TORONTO.- The Koffler Gallery announces the second exhibition in its new downtown home at Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto. Moving to Stand Still is a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Israeli artist Sigalit Landau. Curated by Koffler Gallery Director/Curator Mona Filip, the exhibition runs from February 6 to April 6, 2014.
Moving to Stand Still is the only North American stop on a significant international tour that includes presentations in Moscow, Budapest, Tromso and now Toronto. The exhibition brings together six major video performance works – shown for the first time in Canada – offering a poetic investigation with global resonance of the complex realities of Landau’s native country.
Two fundamental notions are central to Landau’s videos: the endless movement in search of a place of belonging and the indelible wound of a traumatic history as well as a disputed present.
Barbed Hula (2000) features the artist spinning a barbed wire hoop around her bare waist, her body creating space for itself within the wounding border. In Day Done (2007), the painting of a black circle around the window of a house in south Tel Aviv creates an ambivalent illusion of a wound or target, referencing a custom meant to remember the biblical destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
In DeadSee (2005), Landau confronts the ecological consequences of massive agricultural exploitation that leaves both nature and humanity vulnerable in its wake. Salted Lake (2011) takes the viewer as witness as a pair of shoes encased in crystalized Dead Sea salt slowly melts the frozen surface of a lake in Poland, one of the most charged sites in the memory of Jewish trauma.
Azkelon (2011) proposes interactive exchange through a children’s game of borders on the beach between Gaza, populated mostly by Palestinian refugees, and Ashkelon, established by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. In Laces (2011), a young girl plays a hopeful game underneath a negotiation table while adults discuss potentially serious implications above.
Each one of Landau’s video performances contains the offering of a moment of transcendence, the pivotal moment of choice towards an imaginable resolution. Though set up as repeating loops where action endlessly begins and fails in an ostensibly inescapable cycle, the works imply that the solution lies inside the boundaries, not in a breakout. The repetitive, confined movement becomes akin to stillness, summoning transformation from within.
