Sigalit Ethel Landau is an Israeli sculptor, video and installation artist.
Biography
Sigalit Ethel Landau was born in 1969 in Jerusalem. She spent several years in the US and the UK. Between 1990 and 1995, she studied Art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. During this time, she spent one-semester as an exchange student at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. She currently lives and works in Israel with her partner in life and art Yotam From and her daughter Imree. Her brother is the artist Daniel Landau.
Art career
Landau is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work includes drawing, sculpture, video and performance art, sometimes self-standing and sometimes forming whole environments. Her complex works touch on social, historical, political, and ecological issues, embracing topics such as homelessness, banishment, and the relationships between victim and victimizer and between decay and growth. As much of her work is concerned with the human condition, the body is a key motif and guide. Using salt, sugar, paper and ready-made objects, Landau creates large-scale in site installations, which totally change the spaces she works in. One of Landau's best-known works is Salt Works, a series of salt sculptures created by immersing metal sculptural frames into the Dead Sea.
Exhibitions
1990s
In 1994, Landau showed in the group exhibition 'Tranzit' in the haunted spaces of floor 5, at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, and in Export Surplus, the Bugrashov Gallery's street show. Both shows were part of ArtFocus 1, and both early exhibitions dealt with nomadism and place, and deciphering the essence of these sites. In one, she inhabited a homeless shelter; in the other Landau created a castaway group show on the water breakers in front of Bugrashov beach. In 1995 she showed her work Iron Door Tent with Guy Bar Amoz at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. In 1996 Landau exhibit at the 'Witte de With'. Following her Rotterdam experience, Landau made and showed 'Resident Alien I' the following year in the Herzliya Museum, and after that in Documenta X and at the 47th Venice Biennale. She deformed the metal floor of the cargo containers using heat and intense hammering to look like a function as hills. Landau represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and again in 2011. She exhibited at Documenta X in 1997. In 1999 Landau exhibited her work in the Chisenhale Gallery, London, and then at Spacex in Exeter. The following year, she won the first Times/ArtAngel Open commission: to transformed a concrete mixer into a music box, she had every intention of "living in it forever and traveling with the story performed with it in the streets…".
2000s
In her 2001 New York City Exhibition, Sigalit turned the Thread Waxing space into a cotton candy crater, spinning the sweet fibers around herself and the audience, to the music of "Arab-Snow". Returning to Israel during the time of the Second Intifada, she worked with Haaretz newspaper front pages, transforming them each day into sculptures of fruit. Her outdoor drying area was the studio's roof, where she took her replete balls-crops-growths to dry. These balls were main part of her "The Country" Installation at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv-Yaffo. After her mother's death in 2003, she opened "The Endless Solution" in 2005 at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art in Habima Square. In "The Dining Hall" at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin,, She made a chain of installations dealing with private, communal, and public food, feeding and starving. Culminating in a monumental public sculpture of bloody doner kebabs, dedicated to the Turkish doner kebab carvers in the streets of Germany. In 2008 her work "Imaginary Coordinates," appeared at the Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL. The same year, she exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Berlin KW. In 2008 her work Salt sails+Suger knots was shown at Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris.
