Salt Years explores two decades of Sigalit Landau’s artistic creation to both reveal and illuminate her performances, objects, installations, games, dreams, videos and desires. Since 2004, the Dead Sea has appeared as a ritualistic  motif in her art. In a dramatic desert landscape, its salty sterility offset by its buoyancy, her art has co-opted the sea to transform the most threatening, or abject, memory into a crystalline object of wonder. As if in a parable, Landau has employed this process of transmutation as an analogy, amongst others, for love, for loss, for growth, for hope and for the future peaceful co-existence of the three peoples of Israel, Jordan and Palestine that border the Dead Sea’s shores.

 

Essays by curators, scientists, philosophers and other artists, as well as by Landau herself, give background, building bridges across the salt, to reach out into both past and future to make sense of the fractured present. Landau’s work is radical, humane and visionary. Like salt, it sustains the essence of life while also painfully salving its wounds.

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Book details

Graphic Design and Visual Editing:

Michael Gordon

Editing: David Goss

Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag

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Texts by:

Rona Cohen, Ph.D., Luna Goldberg, M.A., David Goss, Ph.D., Dalia Manor, Ph.D., Amitai Mendelsohn, Ph.D., Eli Raz, Thorsten Sadowsky, Ph.D., Tal Sterngast

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