Sigalit Landau

Biography

Sigalit Landau was born and raised in Jerusalem and spent several years in the US and the UK. Her brother is the artist Daniel Landau Her mother came from a Viennese family that had migrated to London, and her father is a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor. In 1993, she spent a year as an exchange student at Cooper Union School of Art and Design in New York. In 1994, she graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Today she lives and works in Tel-Aviv.

Artistic career

In 1994, Landau took part in two group exhibitions as part of ArtFocus 1994. One of the exhibitions, Transit, was an art project that offered artists an exhibition space in the shopping area of the new Central Bus Station in Tel-Aviv. Landau chose to inhabit a hideaway space occupied by homeless people, which she found in the compound, where she created an installation that consisted of a series of doors scratched and punctured by metal fingernails.

In the late 1990s, Landau began to create video art works. One is Barbed Hula (2000), showing a nude female body (the artist’s) rolling on and around her belly a hula hoop made of barbed wire, which injures the skin with every move. The visual experience combines hypnotic beauty with a sense of excruciating pain, making it difficult to watch. In this work, as in some of her other videos, the theme of circular and cyclical motion is central. Landau integrates her experience in the medium of movement in space – she studied dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance’s high school – with a deep understanding of the video-art form, which is based on continued movement and the projection cycle (loop).

In a review of her installation "Thread Waxing Space" in Frieze Magazine in October 2001, her work was described as "pleasure-filled and sugar-coated, consistently building upon narratives and myths, rewriting fables for post-modernity."

In DeadSee (2005), the artist is filmed floating on the Dead Sea among hundreds of watermelons joined by a string that form a spiral. Some of the watermelons are open, with their wound-like red flesh accentuated by the green background. In a slow and hypnotizing motion, the string is pulled and the spiral is unraveled, allowing time for contemplation and reflection. The Dead Sea, both the place and the symbol, features in a number of Landau's works.

Landau describes her work as "bridge-building": “In my [sub]consciousness I search for new and vital materials for connecting the past with the future, the East with the West, and private with the collective … using scattered and broken words in order to define a pile of meaningless objects and transform it into a soft heap of dream buds, to influence the uncertain horizon."

In 2012, two bronze sculptures created by Landau were stolen from the yard of an art collector in Herzliya. Landau and the collector believe they were not stolen for their value as works of art, but by thieves who wanted to melt them down for the metal. The works were "Vomitus-Narcisus" (2007), depicting a pregnant woman staring into a pool of her own vomit, and "Stranded on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea" (2009), a figurative interpretation of Landau's 2005 video in which she was filmed trying to balance herself on a watermelon at the Dead Sea.

Awards

Exhibitions