artist profile
Sigalit Landau
born
1969
lives and works
Jaffa, Israel
education
BFA, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel, 1994
about the artist
Sigalit Landau composes epic visual poetry in her performances, videos, installations, and sculptures. Her projects are sometimes painful and always difficult in their inflicted metastases from the corporal to the psychological and back. She uses elements of the earth, such as salt or sugar, to coat memories, wounds, feelings, and awareness, so that she and her audiences may draw metaphors that contemplate the metaphysical complexities of this world. The artist invokes the specters of old and new Israel in her works; among the most iconic is "DeadSee" where she incorporates her body in a spiral of watermelons. Selected to show in the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1997 and 2011, Landau has also mounted solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA; the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, Israel; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; and the Witte de With | Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Recipient of numerous prestigious awards, residency grants, and scholarships, Landau has been invited to participate in group exhibitions held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel; the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, USA; the Salina Art Center in Salina, USA; the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Lucerne, Switzerland; the WINZAVOD Moscow Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Austria.