The painting belongs to an ongoing project whose first works were exhibited in the Iraqi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. In the fall of 2016 Alÿs spent nine days embedded with Irqi Kurdish forces, known as the Peshmergam outside Mosul, Iraq. He accompanied the soldiers along a 23-kilometer frontline, which the artist describes as “a hill moving slowly into the outskirts” of the city. The paintings capture the reality of life on a battleground, protected from ISIS fighters by a simple mound of dirt. The beige, and brown shades used in this painting echo the colours of the dusty earth, and the soldier’s uniforms.
