Sigalit Landau's project for Venice 2011 consisted of three major installations inside the pavilion, and a fourth one in the backyard. Water, salt and earth were the principal metaphors in this subtle but powerful exhibition. The ground level installation was a huge pipe system, in which water was running in a closed circle, like blood through the body's arteries. The pipes lead to a concealed space, which the artist discovered and revealed, previously sealed between the lower and middle floors of the pavilion. The upper floor was the arena in which a cinematographic scene of a sinking salt pair of shoes was projected on a large wall. The shoes, previously dipped in the Dead Sea, were now melting the ice of a lake in Gdansk and sinking into the cold waters. The sense of lifeless water was enhanced by the presence in the space of a fishermen's net, also covered with Dead Sea salt. The middle floor connected the lower and upper floors into one entity, presenting a debate round table on which 12 laptops featured different segments of the same and one scene, showing a little girl under the table, tying the shoelaces of the debaters In the backyard, at last, a circle of 12 bronze pairs of shoes was lying on the floor, echoing the round table and the debaters' shoes left behind after fleeing from the scene in the movie.

Curator : Jean de Loisy, Ilan Wizgan

Site specific exhibition in the gallery's basement space.
The water leaving the watermelons cured with salt, filled and oxidized the copper plates turning them into bright turquoise puddles/fountains.

Cycle Spun (2007) comprises three discrete video loops by Sigalit Landau (b. 1969). Functioning together as a trilogy and a triptych of moving images, the videos each depict a performative act of spinning, or circular motion, against a landscape backdrop in Landau's native Israel. In the wall-sized projection DeadSee (2005), a cord connects five hundred watermelons, creating a six-meter, spiral shaped raft on the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea. Secured within this sculptural configuration, the artist floats with an arm outstretched toward a collection of "wounded" fruits, their intensely red flesh revealed. The nautilus form gradually unfurls, leaving the surface of the water a nearly monochromatic azure and the artist's body exposed.

Curator : Klaus Biesenbach

In the center of this multi-space installation I have reconstructed and transformed an industrial large dishwasher, which I bought from a Kibbutz in Israel. This digestive space was surrounded by some other rooms; one filled with lamps hung at or below waist level, thickly encrusted with glistening salt crystals: another furnished as a living room, circa 1950's, with a kitchen. The hotplates of the stove had been replaced by speakers, from which the voices of four women could be heard talking about their life experiences. Around the corner was a small key-cutting stall, and the keys this workshop produced were not exact copies, but pendants to the original, seamlessly interlocking with their ward. The large hall provided a very different scenario altogether. Human figures climbed architectural structures and ladders or lied on the floor; others stood on their heads in big metal buckets and tubs. They seemed like anatomical models, flayed nudes fashioned from papier-mâché, with twisted newspaper cords for ribs and muscles, and painted the color of blood. One of the structures resembled a giant döner kebab, referencing all the kebab houses on the streets of Berlin and elsewhere; another echoed Brancusi's symbol of hope, the Endless Column, a ceiling-high stack of pyramidal shapes. In a corner, whole peeled watermelons were being dehydrated on a large metal bed of salt, their consistency turning to that of flesh.

Curator: Gabriele Horn

I created a remote, hostile living habitat, peopled by a Sisyphean community occupied with overcoming and surviving some undisclosed disaster, and making a new start. I transformed the huge space to simulate another place (the environs of the Dead Sea) and an indefinable period, with signs of Modernity (such as an old car, a bicycle and some machines) alluding to sometime in the mid-20th century. The show's title, as well as other clues included in the gigantic installation, pointed to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Layered images, laden simultaneously with local and universal meanings, both historical and contemporary, filled the space and jolted the viewer: the Dead Sea, both annihilating and purifying; images of crucifixion, sacrifice and redemption; a volcano, a bustling hive, a deadly furnace; and overhanging images of Eros, the infinite life force, overcoming Death's finiteness.

Curator: Mordechai Omer

An installation, created over the course of twenty-two months in my studio in Tel Aviv, and shown in the former Alon Segev Gallery space in Tel Aviv, which was situated two floors below ground level in the city center. The first room contained a subterranean plantation of large fruit, each fruit made of papier-mâché produced from an edition of a daily newspaper. The time elapsed since 28.9.00 - the day the El-Aqsa intifada broke out - had become concentrated into a massive volume of daily fruit. In the second section of the show, I reconstructed a typical Mediterranean rooftop, with a dark panoramic skyline. On this roof, three sculpted figures were picking, hauling and tallying the red fruit produced in the first orchard-like space. The almost total destruction of whatever characterizes human life leaves behind its residue: about ten small stations occupied by two men, a woman, jars, a food hoard, wine glasses, pipes, balls. Among the detritus, a giant photograph of Tel Aviv on the wall and a diary on the floor, with handwritten notes in Hebrew; a few lines on the war which brought about the destruction of the world.

With a nylon stocking to protect the hair of the volunteering models, I offered the audience to let me cover and cocoon their heads and faces with warm and soft extrusions of cotton candy. This material is easy to sculpt and mold, the masks design varied slightly—I created them "on the spot" during talking to the person, taking requests to hide under some specific design. The less brave audience that gathered around the mask bearers ate their way through these enlarged soft helmets. Melting was also a transformation that occurred and clung to the faces, like cobwebs. This event took place in New York [EXIT ART], Um El-Fahem.

curator: Areiela Azoulay. Tokyo curator Nirit Nelson.

The show at the 'Thread Waxing Space' was site-specific and prophetic [see 'Arab Snow' video]. It related primarily to the gallery space - at first an early twentieth-century factory, part of a thriving fashion industry; then a non-profit installation and performance gallery. Due to the rising rents in SoHo, my installation at The 'Thread Waxing Space' was the last show before its closure.

Curator : lia gangitano

A transformation of a truck-mounted concrete mixer into a large traveling and performing music box. This transformed mixer was both an ice cream van and a story vehicle. The rotating drum functioned as the cylinder with pins attached to its surface. Several tunes and sounds were composed for the repertoire of this mixer by musicians Arik Hayut, Guy Kark, Daniel Landau, Robert Bentley, and Ohad Fischof. The notes of these melodies were played electronically and were made to sound similar to the way ice cream vans disseminate their tunes. This truck played music while traveling along small roads and parked at various stops, where people gathered to participate in the exchange. I gave the passers-by ice lollies in the shape of the Little Matchstick Girl.

In Resident Alien I, I hammered the metal floor of a standard sea cargo container with heat. This resulted in the deformation of the container's floor into a landscape resembling the Judean desert.
The public, climbing this "mountain home," could discover a heavy hammer penetrating a slightly smaller hammer on the other side of the 'hill'. In the top right corner of the container I hung a bottomless box with a radio playing inside it. Upon inserting their heads, the viewers found themselves between the two leg places of a clean Eastern toilet-hole device, listening to local Arab radio station.

Curators: Dalia Levin, Haim deuel-Lusky, Sarah Beitberg Semel

On Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a large rock (housed under the golden Dome of the Rock). This rock is the subject of many myths and beliefs, both Jewish and Muslim. It is mainly due to this rock and the history of this mountain that Jerusalem was and is holy to both religions and it is this holy site that is one of the top hurdles on the path to lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, and between Judaism and Islam. I simulated the lifting of this stone and placed "its absence" in my show. In contrast to the centralized monolithic temple at the Dome of the mono-Rock and also to the hand-sized idealistic Intifada stones, stones can be found in the form of gravel covering the ground of the outdoor Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum, where there are many layers of artifacts from many eras and cultures. I invited the public to throw this gravel (fragments of stones, fragments of rocks) at a high-up Tambourine-Eye.

Curators: Sarit Shapira and Igal Tsalmona

Installations shown in the framework of ArtFocus I were exhibited in vacant shop space at Tel Aviv's New Central Bus Station. I put my work up in what seemed to be a hideout of homeless and/or of Palestinians working far from home. I discovered this place after noticing a hole in a plaster wall. This incursion into architectural wasteland then became the entrance into my installation. I left the things that were already there – vestiges of life – and in some cases made use of them in the construction of my work.

Curator: Sarit Shapira