Salt, Memory, and Transformation: The Artistic Vision of Sigalit Landau

How Sigalit Landau's Sculptures and Installations Bridge the Past, the Sea, and the Human Experience

Sigalit Landau, an Israeli artist known for her evocative and haunting installations, uses salt, the Dead Sea, and memory as recurring motifs in her work. Through a unique combination of sculpture, video, and performance art, Landau engages with themes of transformation, loss, and renewal, creating pieces that evoke both personal and collective histories. Her art often sits at the intersection of the individual and the geopolitical, exploring how the natural landscape, especially the Dead Sea, becomes a site of both healing and conflict.

The Dead Sea: A Site of Transformation and Healing

The Dead Sea, with its unique geological properties, has become a central element in Landau’s work. It is not just a location but a transformative medium. In her famous Salt Bride (2016) series, Landau submerges objects, like traditional wedding dresses, into the Dead Sea, allowing salt crystals to accumulate over time.

The result is a hauntingly beautiful transformation, where familiar objects take on an otherworldly, crystalline appearance. The act of submerging these items is symbolic, representing the way time, nature, and history can reshape objects and memories. The salt encrustations evoke both preservation and petrification, creating a sense of timelessness while hinting at fragility. In Salt Bride, the dress, inspired by S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, speaks to a story of possession and liberation, reflecting broader themes of transformation and resistance in Jewish folklore and history.

The Power of Salt as a Metaphor

Salt, as both a preservative and a corrosive element, holds deep metaphorical significance in Landau’s work. It serves as a reminder of how the passage of time can both heal and destroy, depending on the context. Landau’s use of the Dead Sea’s salt in her sculptures and installations embodies this duality. It is at once a material for creating beauty and a symbol of decay and loss.

In DeadSee (2005), one of her most iconic video installations, Landau floats in the Dead Sea surrounded by a spiral of 500 watermelons.

The piece is a slow, meditative exploration of life and death, as the melons, some whole, some split open, rotate around her. The spiral recalls ancient symbols of eternity, but the rotting fruit reminds viewers of the inevitable decay of life. Here, Landau uses the Dead Sea not just as a backdrop but as an active participant in the artwork, with its salt-filled waters representing both an isolating and nurturing force.

The Personal and the Political

Landau’s art is deeply connected to her personal experiences growing up in Israel, a country marked by conflict and division. Many of her pieces reflect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using the human body, natural elements, and man-made objects to symbolize the tensions between these groups.

In works like Barbed Hula (2000), a performance piece where Landau hula-hoops with a ring of barbed wire, she viscerally explores the pain and endurance that define life in a contested land. The barbed wire in this piece serves as a metaphor for borders and barriers, both physical and emotional, that divide people.

Memory and the Sea

For Landau, the sea is a space of memory, both personal and collective. Her works often reference the histories of migration, exile, and displacement, themes that resonate in her own family’s history of survival and adaptation. The Dead Sea, in particular, becomes a powerful symbol of these themes, as it is a natural border that has witnessed the passing of civilizations, conflicts, and peoples.

In Azkelon (2011), Landau created sculptures using casts of her own body submerged in salt water, leaving behind ghostly imprints of herself, evoking the idea of the body as a vessel for memory.

The salt-encrusted forms seem fragile, yet they endure, much like the memories of those who have lived through displacement or exile. The sea, as a place that both erases and preserves, offers a poignant metaphor for the fragility and resilience of human experience.

Art as Transformation and Healing

Landau’s work is ultimately about transformation, both physical and emotional. Her use of the Dead Sea and salt allows her to explore how materials, landscapes, and histories can be transformed over time. Whether it’s the metamorphosis of a submerged object or the slow erosion of personal and political boundaries, Landau’s art is imbued with a sense of hope and renewal, even in the face of loss and conflict.

Her ability to take familiar objects, like dresses, barbed wire, or watermelons, and recontextualize them through the natural process of crystallization speaks to her ongoing interest in how art can serve as a form of healing. By transforming everyday items into objects of beauty and contemplation, Landau invites viewers to engage with the deeper processes of change that affect us all, both individually and collectively.