SALZBURG.- Sigalit Landau (b. Jerusalem, IL, 1969) is one of Israel’s most prominent contemporary artists of her generation. For over fifteen years, the Dead Sea has been a source of inspiration and a laboratory for Landaus’ video works, photographic series’ and salt sculptures. Her site-specific work, in a variety of mediums, relates to private and collective memory, archaic and utopic myths, and to present day issues of the human condition. Using a diverse range of materials, while interacting with the human body, Landau weaves the social with the intimate, the historical with the private, the local with narratives of epic scale. The exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will premier salt-crystallized sculptures and installations created by Landau throughout her years of work at the Dead Sea. Almost as a ritual, she and her team have been immersing objects in the saturated saline waters of this unique lake. Some of the submerged objects are hand made from specific and symbolic materials, e.g. fishing nets or barbed wire, others from personal belongings, and many of these objects stand for a world that has gone missing. Through the submersion in the water of the lake, these sculptures are then coated in saltcrystals, becoming fragile creations imbued with a terrifying beauty, reminiscent of archaeological finds that tell of the unceasing transformation of all things and of the darkest chapters in the history of the 20th Century.

The artist describes her salt pieces as conceptual readymades. In the galleries of the museum at the Mönchsberg, she will arrange them in site specific choreographed installations. A selection of her videos, which relate to the Dead Sea and also to the Mediterranean seashore, will be shown on two gallery floors at the Rupertinum. In these works, Landau addresses questions of female identity and bodily experience as well as the political situation in Israel and the man-made disaster and consequential threat to the Dead Sea itself. Titled Salt Years, the monographic exhibition gathers expansive installations featuring salt sculptures, a series of photographs made in collaboration with Yotam From, and 13 video works. Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, explains: “Powerfully moving, profoundly poetic, and pregnant with sometimes harrowing symbolism, Sigalit Landau’s oeuvre speaks to existential and ambivalent rites of passage and liminal experiences. Created in one of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world, her works bear the vision of peaceful coexistence between different people, religions, cultures, and world-views, and this vision lends them universal relevance.” The artist Sigalit Landau notes: “In the light of history, and in the shadows of my family’s past in Austria, I am excited and challenged by this opportunity to exhibit my work in Salzburg—a city in whose history salt played a key role.

The new sculptures are making their journey from the earth’s lowest point to the top of Mönchsberg hill. In my works, the Dead Sea is able to reflect and sustain contrasts. A place, which transforms time into glamorous crystals; salt—an element that heals as well as enables life, a substance that can also be toxic, preservative, constructive— it is my medium magnifier and messenger.”

The daughter of Jewish immigrants with Austrian roots, Sigalit Landau grew up in Jerusalem; her family also spent several years in Philadelphia and London. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Over the past twenty-five years, the interdisciplinary artist has built an extensive oeuvre spanning video and installation art, photography, and sculpture that has drawn wide international acclaim. Landau is fascinated by biblical and mythological narratives and the expressive-figurative traditions of art history. Many of her works feature her own body in a central role, reflecting her training in dance. Her creative practice also undertakes an interpretation of the history and nature of her native country in order to initiate a process of healing and to build bridges between communities that would seem to be living in different worlds. Landau first came to the attention of broad audiences when her art was on view at documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Over the past two decades, she has had numerous exhibitions in several countries, including at MoMA, New York (2008), in the Israeli pavilion at the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011), at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2012), and at the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2014).