"Endless Games". Sigalit Landau

Wednesday, January 25, 2017 02:03 + to quote book

Small black dress for the bride

Sigalit Landau, an artist from Israel, began her project “Salt Bride” three years ago. In 2014 she sank a black dress victorian era into the water Dead Sea and watched the changes taking place, recording everything on film. Two years later, the dress was removed from the water, but it was all covered with a salt crust and turned from black to white.

IN this moment Eight photographs of the Salt Bride project are exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London. As the artist herself admits, she was inspired by the 1916 play “Between Two Worlds” for these manipulations with the dress. “The dress seemed to have turned into snow or sugar. It’s like accepting death: solid tears, like whiteness, surrendering under the combined pressure of fire and water,” Landau poetically talks about his project.

Limits of fantasy creative people don’t borrow and often they simply don’t exist. As proof of this, for example, the installation Israeli artist Sigalit Landau of his project “Salty Bride”.
Artist Sigalit Landau sank a black mourning dress to the bottom of the Dead Sea. Over the course of two years, the artist's team dived into the sea to capture the level of growth of sparkling salt crystals.

The project was inspired by The Dybbuk, a 1916 drama about unhappy love and exorcism in Jewish folklore. The dress is a copy of what actress Hanna Rovina wore - main character films.

For two for long years the mourning dress was on day of the dead sea, gradually becoming covered with salt crystals. There was such a large layer of salt on the dress that it could not be pulled ashore, so some fragments remained in the sea.

With her project Sigalit showed amazing power nature, capable of miraculously changing various objects.

“The Salty Bride” Sigalit Landau

Victoria Wright

How can you turn an ordinary, unremarkable black dress into a shiny, sparkling work of art without adding rhinestones or covering it in glitter?

Of course, immerse it in the Dead Sea.

An unusual art project by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau is called “The Salty Bride.” Salt Bride»).

An ordinary black dress was immersed in waters of the Dead sea ​​for 2 months, checking its condition every couple of weeks. During this time, 8 photographs were taken that clearly show the stages of transformation of a piece of clothing.

While the dress was in the water, salt crystals formed on its fabric. With each new sparkling salty layer, the dress became harder and harder.

Final result turned out to be amazing.

The artist was inspired for the project by the play “Dybbuk,” written in Yiddish. The dress used in the installation is an exact copy traditional Hasidic dress worn by the play's protagonist, the young bride Leah.

The play tells the story of how a girl's body was taken over by a spirit and the subsequent exorcism ceremony.

An artistic interpretation of Sigalit shows how a black dress, a symbol of death and madness, turns into a white wedding dress in dark waters Dead Sea.

Sigalit Landau chose the Dead Sea for her project for a reason

The artist grew up in a house on a hill overlooking the northern part of the Dead seas. The girl had previously used salt-rich seawater for her projects to transform various items into statues, covering them with crystals, and filming underwater videos.

Sigalit says that the Dead Sea has special kind of magic.

« It all looks like snow", says the press release from The Salty Bride. - " It's like sugar, like death's embrace; these are pure tears. As if white retreats before the union of fire and water».

Photos of the dress transformation can be seen in London Museum MarlboroughContemporary

Works Sigalit Landau– decoration of leading museums contemporary art worldwide. Her videos and installations demonstrate A New Look to familiar things, blurring the boundaries between past and present, reality and fiction.

After spending long years in the USA and Great Britain, she returned to her homeland and continues to work in Tel Aviv, creating art objects that represent a mixture of contemporary art and eternal philosophical reflection about the essence of things. Landau's works, most often in video form, can be seen at many exhibitions, including in Moscow, in State Gallery on Solyanka.

Should we consider this an involuntary coincidence as some kind of sign – after all, most of the artist’s works are somehow related to salt. Water and salt - flesh and blood native land, Sigalit uses them in a variety of contexts and different ways. The white crystalline crust bizarrely changes not only the appearance, but, it seems, the very essence of things, even if it is barbed wire - a formidable and bitter symbol, also often found in Landau’s works.

However, this is far from the only item changed by salt. One of the most ambitious projects The artist, captured on video, was a spiral of several dozen ripe watermelons immersed in the Dead Sea. The metaphorical nature of such compositions and their perception, coupled with understanding, depends on in this case only from the viewer's eye.

It is equally difficult to formulate the true message of another composition - Salted Lake. For 11 minutes, right before the eyes of the spectators, the salt-soaked boots smoothly sink under the ice of a lake near Gdansk. Of course, from the point of view of banal chemistry, there is a completely natural explanation for what is happening. But the author's goal was clearly not a chemical experiment.

Although the work of Sigalit Landau is not completely apolitical, the metaphors in similar works cannot be regarded as a reference to specific events in the history of the country. Rather, they cover an immeasurably vast space that only art can reflect.

And if in “Salt Lake” salt plays a rather destructive role, then new project The artist reflects precisely the fact that this substance can also be creative.

The idea is based on the plot of S. A. Ansky’s play “The Dybbuk” (another name is “Between Two Worlds”), which inspired Sigalit Landau. Sad story, based on folk legends, tells about the tragedy of two lovers. A young man separated from his bride sells his soul to the devil, and after death he himself becomes a demon, inhabiting the body of his beloved. The story itself and its tragic ending are sad.

Landau ordered the costume designers to wear a black mourning outfit for the heroine of the play, and with the help of a weighted frame, she confined it for several months “between two worlds” - in the waters of the Dead Sea. Several times she and her assistants went underwater to capture all the stages of the metamorphosis that occurred with the dress. And the result was more impressive than one might have expected.

The salt-saturated waters did what would have been beyond the power of tailors and designers. The salt crystals deposited on the fabric gradually changed its color, and then began to layer, giving new uniform. The outfit retrieved two months later looked like a snow-white wedding robe from a fairy tale, created from sugar or fluffy snow. You can see a good omen in this - the black mourning color was replaced by sparkling white, the eternal symbol of purity. The artist herself considers this a sign that circumstances are changeable, but the essence of the thing always remains unchanged.

The Salt bride series, created through the process of transforming a dress, was shown at the Marlborough Contemporary exhibition in London.

People like Sigalit Landau clearly prove that there are no topics that art cannot cover. And the more unpredictable amazing will be the result of creativity, the higher its value.

Israeli sculptor Sigalit Landau invented her technique of making works by immersing papier-mâché frames in the waters of the Dead Sea. Before immersion, objects are secured with fishing lines or cords to wooden or metal frames. The entire performance is carefully documented in photos and videos. The process of salt crystallization on the frame is also constantly filmed and monitored by the author on a special website through underwater mini-cameras. When the thing is completely covered with a salt crust, the sculptor takes it out and puts it on display for the audience.

For Sigalit Landau, the Dead Sea is not just a place unique in its healing and ecological significance. For her, the Dead Sea is a place of important personal memories, where she often visited as a child and married to photographer and collaborator Yotam From.

At the same time, the sea is a place of Power, on a planetary, cosmic scale. According to her Sigalit Landau, she chose this sea because it is here that truth and spirituality are to some extent “tangible.” The absence of gravity, the different refraction of light in water, the unity of the beauty of the place and its frightening sterility - this is what forces the sculptor to continue to crystallize his signs - memories - in it.

As a conceptual sculptor, Landau is convinced that the Dead Sea changes the properties of objects immersed in it not only externally, but also changes them inner essence. Having been in the waters of this sea, things move into another reality, lose their previous utilitarian meaning and become signs in new universe. Ballet tutu, Wedding Dress, shoes and even a violin - they are all signs of another universe that have returned to our reality.

Associated with each item personal story sculptor, which is documented in detail in the form of texts and photographs in the book “Salt Years”. The book is dedicated to the 15th anniversary of Segalit Landau’s work and talks in detail about how she donates significant things to the sea and the sea returns them transformed. Landau sees a biblical meaning in this sacrifice, giving a part of herself to the sea. So, tutu- a symbol of her giving up her dream of becoming a ballerina so that her parents would not separate. This pack, transformed by salt, is a symbol of illusory hopes healed by the sea.

Sigalit Landau was born in Jerusalem in 1969, then lived for some time in the USA and Great Britain. She graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in the 1990s. After a six-month internship in New York, she lives permanently in Israel.

Sigalit Landau's performances remind viewers that you need to be able to sacrifice something dear to you for the sake of a great goal.