Sigalit Landau

Landau was born in Jerusalem in 1969 and grew up there, later describing her childhood as full of ideals and optimism.[1][4] She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors; her father, Frederick (Simcha) Landau, survived imprisonment as a young child in a concentration camp in Transnistria.[7] Her English-born mother introduced her to the Dead Sea during childhood, establishing a connection that later became central to her artistic practice.[8]

She studied at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, completing her art studies in 1994.[1][6] She also holds a master’s degree from Bezalel.[9] After studying, she worked in the United States and the United Kingdom, and subsequently lived and worked in Tel Aviv.[1][4]

Landau’s practice encompasses theatrical installations, figurative and expressive sculpture, video, drawing, painting, and photography, as well as performance.[2][6] Her recurring subjects include the human condition, banishment, and the relationship between victim and victimizer.[2] Borders, motherhood, land, and the body also recur across works that engage with the complexities of place and connections between divided cultures.[4]

Her conceptual and sculptural works address difference and dominance, including through cargo containers transformed into spaces of “refuse and refuge.”[10] These container works connect nomadic desert life with homelessness among both Bedouin and Jewish people.[10] Alongside conventional artistic media, she has used Israeli sand and Dead Sea water and salt as materials.[4]

Landau’s international exhibition history includes documenta in Kassel, a contemporary art museum in Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[6] She participated in a Venice Biennale group exhibition in the late 1990s and mounted a solo exhibition in the Israeli pavilion in 2011.[11][5] Her work is held in major collections including MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.[6]

Landau made Sisyphus and Jacob Meet Above a Well for her 2004 exhibition The Infinite Solution.[12] The two-meter-high sculpture, constructed from iron and paper pulp, won the 2007 Dan Sandel Prize.[12] The prize judges recognized her career achievements and exhibitions, emphasizing the vitality and contemporary relevance of the myths and cultural narratives she brought together and challenged.[12]

Her 2012 exhibition Cariatide, at the Negev Museum of Art in Beersheba, was her first solo exhibition in Israel in seven years and combined new works with works previously shown abroad.[13] Landau described it as a personal exhibition about femininity, home, motherhood, and orphanhood.[13] Its title referred to female figures in ancient Greek architecture that support a roof on their heads, which she connected both to contemporary women and to her own mother.[13] She recalled that her mother had an academic education but relinquished a career while taking responsibility for the home.[13]

One installation in the exhibition, Four Mothers, resembled a domestic kitchen and living room, with the recorded voices of four women whom Landau had gathered and interviewed emerging from an oven.[13] Another work, Shelter, developed from a concrete shelter she noticed on her daily route along Levinsky Street in Tel Aviv.[14] After two years of work, she recreated it at monumental scale in bronze for the Negev Museum of Art, preserving its textures while covering its graffiti.[14]

The bronze work reproduced the shelter’s interior staircase, with suspended stairs and an open entrance creating a sense of disorientation and an absence of protection.[13] It was not a shelter that visitors could enter: Landau called it “a mental state.”[14] Its presentation in Beersheba connected the work to the experience of rocket alerts and a continuing sense of threat.[14]

Her 2014 sculpture Father and Tupik addressed her father’s childhood during the Holocaust and his bond with a dog in the camp.[7] Frederick Landau was one year old when he and his family were deported across the Dniester River to a camp in Mogilev.[7] At about three, he secretly shared food with a dog named Tupik despite the severe scarcity of food among the prisoners.[7]

For the Israeli pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Landau prepared One Man’s Floor Is Another Man’s Feelings, a title playing on the English saying about one person’s floor being another’s ceiling.[11] The installation was conceived around human interdependence and combined photography, sculpture, video, and spatial arrangement.[11]

The Israeli Biennale budget was one million shekels, divided equally between the culture and foreign ministries.[11] Landau said that more than 80 percent of it went toward pavilion maintenance, transport, insurance, and staff, and she sought to raise a further $350,000 for research and production.[11] A sale of her works helped raise funds; she explained that she would not have organized such a sale for herself but could do so for the pavilion.[11]

In Azkelon (2011), photographed on the border between Ashkelon and Gaza, young men play a game called “Knives,” also known as “Countries.”[4] Each landing of a knife produces a new line in the sand, giving the repeatedly drawn and altered boundaries political undertones.[4]

Landau’s 2014 video Knafeh follows the preparation of the Middle Eastern dessert over 16 minutes, matching the time needed to make it.[4] She associated knafeh with childhood and described it as a culinary bridge between communities and between East and West.[4] Filming took place during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, and a siren sounding outside entered the video through the studio window.[4]

Landau began experimenting with the Dead Sea’s salt about two years after her mother’s death in 2003.[8] In 2005, she first immersed a sandal, then tried an abandoned bicycle found on a Tel Aviv sidewalk.[8] She described the sea as part of her artistic “lexicon” and “palette,” and her work there as a partnership.[8]

Her process involves submerging objects until accumulating salt crystals transform their surfaces.[3] Over the years, these objects have included dresses, boots, shoes, lampshade frames, barbed wire, bicycles, musical instruments, a cello, and stools.[3][15] Objects are suspended from frames and later freed with the help of assistants; the resulting sculptures can be brittle, and some become so heavy that four people are needed to carry them.[16] Landau called the water a laboratory and emphasized its unpredictable effects: “You become very humble. What the sea wants, that’s what I’ll get.”[16]

The project brings together the Dead Sea’s capacity to preserve objects and its association with healing for visitors, while the preservation of the sea’s distinctive qualities forms a subtext of the work.[3] Ordinary and culturally charged objects alike acquire thick, bright layers of salt through immersion.[3][15]

Her video DeadSee shows her floating naked within a spiral of 500 watermelons on the Dead Sea.[8][17] Hidden thread connects the melons, and the video records the spiral gradually unravelling without reaching a visible end.[17] Whole, cut, and crushed watermelons surround her nearly motionless body.[18] The work became widely familiar through The Infinite Solution at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion and was subsequently shown in Berlin, New York, and Paris.[17] By 2010, it was installed on a large screen set into the floor of the Israel Museum’s Israeli art gallery.[5]

In Standing on a Watermelon, 2005, a video lasting four minutes and 43 seconds, Landau tries to remain upright on a watermelon in the salt water.[8] Curator Amitai Mendelsohn interpreted the work through baptism and crucifixion, while Landau described its dialogue as involving “sweet, life, salt and death.”[8]

Salt Crystal Bridal Gown (2014) consists of eight underwater photographs documenting the crystallization of a black dress modeled on Hanna Rovina’s costume in The Dybbuk.[8] As salt turned the dress white, the work evoked the biblical story of Lot’s wife becoming a pillar of salt.[8] Other objects invite multiple readings: viewers have interpreted Landau’s salt-covered stretchers both as references to war and wounded people and as forms resembling Torah scrolls.[8]

Her Landscapes in Snow series uses European landscape tapestries immersed in the Dead Sea.[6] Salt crystals shimmer under dramatic lighting and partially abstract the woven landscapes.[6] The contrast between their snow-like appearance and their production in a desert setting serves as an allegory for relations between East and West.[6]

In 2017, Landau launched a crowdfunding campaign for Salt Years, a book collecting photographs of her Dead Sea works.[15] The project included objects already shown in galleries and museums, pieces made for the book, and behind-the-scenes images.[15] By a 2019 interview, she had spent four years working on the 400-page volume, which documented 15 years of artistic activity at the Dead Sea.[9]

The book brought together images of previously unseen sculptures and installations, accounts of their preparation and collaborative production, and writing by art-world contributors, geologists, and other specialists.[9] Landau described it as offering a kind of exposure that no exhibition could provide.[9] Reflecting on the project, she said, “I have an alliance with this place, and I feel committed to it,” and described the wish to emerge from the water and intervene in reality as the book’s conclusion.[9]

The Israel Museum exhibition The Burning Sea, presented in 2022 and continuing through June 2023, surveyed two decades of Landau’s work around the Dead Sea.[3][6] It occupied nine spaces and included about 80 works, combining new and previously exhibited pieces, immersed objects, videos filmed at the sea, and installations.[6] Salt sculptures at its center included barbed-wire fences, stretchers, paintings, and dresses, their accumulated crystals giving them an appearance reminiscent of archaeological finds.[6] Her 2022 work Strand was among the works in the exhibition.[3]

Landau’s proposed floating salt bridge across the Dead Sea is intended to create a crossing between the Israeli and Jordanian shores and connect Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians.[9] She described it as a possible milestone and an architectural expression of a broader concept, and said she was gathering collaborators in the hope that the project could acquire a social dimension.[9]

The 2022 presentation of Salt Bridge Summit included a gallery arranged as a conference room, a fictional laptop conversation, blueprints, and photographs of the proposed bridge.[8] Landau hoped that the bridge might help heal the lake.[8] Although she said she preferred making art, she described the loss of Dead Sea beaches and the emergence of sinkholes as a nationwide tragedy.[8]

Her environmental engagement treats the shrinking Dead Sea as a place of shared fate and responsibility, including responsibility borne by people on both sides of the Israeli-Jordanian border.[6] By 2022, the lake was estimated to have lost a third of its surface area since 1960, with its water level falling by about a meter annually in recent decades.[16] Diversion of Jordan River water and exploitation of the lake’s minerals by Israel and Jordan contributed to the decline.[16] Landau expressed concern that the sea could vanish unless government policies changed.[16]

Landau’s international exhibitions, 2011 solo exhibition in the Israeli pavilion at Venice, and inclusion in major museum collections have established a substantial international presence for her work.[6][9] Her awards include the Gottesdiener Foundation Prize and the Sandberg Prize, alongside the Dan Sandel Prize for Sisyphus and Jacob Meet Above a Well.[9][12]

The Rabbi Sacks Legacy listed Landau among the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s 2022 honorees, alongside film producer Quentin Tarantino and legal scholar Lee Epstein, describing the honorees as recognized for academic leadership, creative achievement, or activities benefiting humanity, Israel, or the Jewish people.[19]

Across her Dead Sea works, family-centered sculpture, and installations about home and protection, Landau has connected personal experience with broader questions of displacement, cultural encounter, and responsibility for place.[4][6] Her continuing commitment to the Dead Sea joins artistic transformation with concern for the future of the landscape that makes the works possible.[3][9]