Sigalit Landau

Salt Years

The Dead Sea tells its own stories. Its salt crystals are like prisms. Through them you can see the world anew. Israeli artist Sigalit Landau creates this vision by using the world’s saltiest sea as her laboratory. Everyday objects are “baptized” by immersing them in the Dead Sea for months. Completely covered in salt, they have a hypnotizing effect. The transience of objects is transposed into the poetic aura of crystalline permanence. In this form, issues of female identity and bodily experience, the shadows of the Holocaust, the tense political situation in Israel, as well as questions of justice, structural violence, and economic exploitation of nature are negotiated. Salt Years is both a catalogue of these works created at the Dead Sea and a visually stunning documentation of the artist’s process.

Sigalit Landau (* 1969, Jerusalem), one of the most important contemporary artists in Israel, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Her works have been shown in many venues in Israel, the US, and Europe, including documenta and at the Venice Biennale.