SOIL consists of 15 Polaroid's of my floating presence in 15 locations around Jerusalem.

All Polaroids have been taken by accidental tourists.

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In SOIL, a seminal work conceived during her MFA studies at Bezalel in Jerusalem, Nira Pereg provides more than a mere record of action; she offers a clinical autopsy of the civilian body trapped within a geography that refuses to be neutral. For Pereg, the public arena is never a mere backdrop. It is an inherently political space: a theater where the state perpetually reasserts its presence upon the individual.In this rare early work, Pereg places herself in front of the camera, initiating a diagnostic inquiry that has become the hallmark of her *oeuvre*: the friction between personal presence and the homeland as a rigid political entity. This early investigation anticipates her sophisticated "morphology of thresholds"—those gates, turnstiles, and barriers that function as the physical syntax of authority. In SOIL, the homeland is stripped of its romantic veil; it is presented not as a pastoral origin, but as a site of ritualized labor and territorial negotiation. Through her hovering presence, Pereg establishes a grueling specificity of time and place. By embedding the exact date and time of the action onto the body of the work, and pairing it with the stark, unrelenting presence of a hard shadow, she transforms the image into a clock. The shadow does not merely darken the earth; it marks the passage of a state-sanctioned hour, turning the artist’s physical endurance into a temporal measurement of occupation.This work serves as a vital precursor to her later archival excavations into the architecture of control in the entire ongoing Sabbath Project. By placing her body within the frame, Pereg testifies to her own ambivalent connection to her homeland. She reminds us that to occupy space is to participate in a political act, and that the "communal country space" is a map of power where every movement is a form of resistance or submission.