Milan Kohout, "Throwing Peas at the Wall" West Bank, 2009

Throwing Peas at the Wall. Beit Sahour, West Bank, Palestine; performance as part of an artist’s residency, July 2009.
Performance: Milan Kohout Photo: Milan Kohout’s archive
After Al Jazeera published an article about his retrospective show in Prague, the Palestinian youth organization Joint Advocacy Initiative offered Kohout a 10-day artist’s residency in Beit Sahour in the Israeli-occupied West Bank area of Palestine. Here are several samples of the performance pieces he did next to the “New Berlin Wall” (when finished it should be 750km / 466 mi long and 10m / 33 ft tall), built by the Israeli government to segregate the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel.
One of the performances he did there was Throwing Peas at the Wall, during which Kohout re- peatedly threw peas for a long period of time at the segregation wall. The idea came from the Old Testament where there are many verses about the vanity of some human actions, and throwing peas at a wall is a complete waste of time because none of them stick to the wall, which serves as a metaphor for repeated stupidity in the history of humankind. The sound of the word “peas” also resembles the word “peace.”