Line Move

In the video art 21 kg (2023, 12:52 minutes), Doaa Bsis rolls a large, heavy stone up and down her body in a long and arduous journey. As viewers, we try to decipher the task she faces, listening intently to her heavy breaths, and waiting expectantly for her success, for a catharsis that refuses to arrive. Like a modern Sisyphus, her hard work is doomed to a futile, repetitive, and endless effort. Her twin creation, Line Move (2023, 3:19 minutes), is a natural continuation, development, and expansion of the former. From lifting a heavy stone, the artist moves to carrying the body weight of a female doppelgänger – similar to her yet alien – who is either resting or being carried on her back, helpless or injured, curled up in a fetal position.

The pair of works maintains two parallel, similar yet different courses of purposeless movement. Unlike traditional narratives, both acts in the play refuse to progress from complication to resolution. They are circular, repeating themselves with slight variations, without any significant change. The artist’s minimalist and quiet actions omit the end of the story, inviting us to complete it ourselves, in accordance with the course of our own lives. The archetypal-mythical, but also the biographical-personal layers accompanying the works guide each of us into private realms that simultaneously draw on our collective historical, cultural, and social memory. Although her works seem devoid of time and place, the hard earth and the large stones anchor them to the here and now, reflecting the heavy burdens we carry as a society, which are becoming even heavier today.

Doaa Bsis (Daliyat al-Karmel, 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator. Her works range from drawing and painting to performance and video, exploring the intersections where movement and drawing meet and coexist. Through body art, she examines the range of movement, freedom of creation, and the boundaries of the self within both artistic and socio-political spaces.