Artist David Reeb’s video work, Ni’ilin 1.5.2009, begins with a tear gas canister fired into the yard of a house where the owners and political activists (“Anarchists against the Wall”) are present.3 Directly thereafter, a group of Border Guard fighters climb to the roof of the house. The soldiers present no document authorizing them to penetrate the house, even when they are asked to do so. In order to scare off the activists, they throw tear gas at them and at the house owners from the roof. The roof serves the soldiers as an observation and firing post at demonstrators in the streets near the house. When they climb off the roof and leave the family home, one of the commanders says to his subordinate who stands next to him: “We must detain them, and you don’t do that. You have to enter their homes at 2 AM and arrest them, before they ever come here.” Reeb documents this moment in the video in his painting Bougainvillea. He isolates the preliminary event by painting one frame from the video, featuring several soldiers marching on a dirt road, and next to them a flowering bougainvillea shrub sprawling beyond the yard of the house.
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