Full Bio:
Sigalit Landau was born in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1969, the first of three children, to Maya Sonntag [b.1942 in London to Viennese refugees] and father Simcha Landau [b.1940 in Bukovina, now Romania]. In 1974-5 the family lived in Philadelphia, and in 1978-9 in London. Landau grew up bi-lingual, multi-cultural, on a hill over looking the Judean Dessert, the skyline of Jordan, and the northern part of the Dead Sea.
Landau went to the Rubin Academy High School and majored in Dance. She had to do the army. She had to undo the Army. Shortly after her graduation of Betzalel academy for art and design, she showed in ‘Tranzit’ in the haunted spaces of floor 5, at the new central bus station of Tel Aviv, and in ‘Export Surplus’ Bograshov Gallery's street show, both shows were part of “ARTFOCUS I”, 1994, and both early exhibitions dealt with nomadism and place, and deciphering the meanings of these sites. In the one, Landau inhabited a Homeless hide out; in the other she created a castaway group show [Yochai Avrahami, Sharon Horody, Yossi Dar, Yasmin Bergener, Gil Nader, Yoav Shmueli] on the water breakers in front of Bograshov beach.
Her next installation was a turned gaze back to Jerusalem, at the Israel Museum, alongside Guy Bar Amotz – titled ‘GRRRR…’ Landau took this exhibition as an opportunity to peep through one of the worlds navels, into and under temple mount and, in parallel, into and under the maintenance of the Israel Museum, a national and archeological site. Jerusalem, a place over burdened with holes, holiness and the less holy layers: mental debris… a history of being claimed, built and destroyed by empires. The differences between the two cities are still immense: Tel Aviv is buffered by a vital normality dreaming a distance from all concrete frontiers but from the "modernity" phantom.
Shortly after this, she exhibited a new show in Rotterdam at the Witte de With. And what better place to view how the system and the logic of a container port town works? A year later Landau exhibited “Resident Alien I” in the Herzliya Museum, and after that in Documenta X and at the 47th Venice biennale. A container that had a deformed metal floor, using heat and intense hammering to look like the hills.
At 1998, Berlin took her as a guest. Landau was hosted by CFA a Berlin gallery and the Hoffman collection, “Barbed Hula” was shot around then in south Tel Aviv, during a visit, but was edited a year or two later.
After this London called and Landau exhibited in the Chisenhale gallery 1999, and in Spacex, Exeter. The following year she won the first TIMES/ART angel OPEN commission. She transformed a concrete mixer into a music box with all intent to live in it forever and travel with the story she performed with in the streets…
In May 2001, in New York City Landau turned a Thread Waxing space into a cotton candy crater, spinning the sweet fibers around herself and the audience, to the music of “Arab Snow”.
Returning to Israel she rented a studio for the first time and lived in it. The days were of second intifada and Landau was working with Ha'Aretz news paper front pages. She transformed the media mass [paper] into daily fruit. Her outdoors was the studio's roof, where she took these blood-replete growths do dry. After her mother's death, she made “The Endless Solution” in the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, of the Tel Aviv Museum – Mediterranean town was taken by a salty current into a 21st century deaditerranian prairie. A Frugal tribe of refugees came into being and with it a salty explosion of buoyant video works.
In “The Dining Hall”, KW Berlin, she made a chain of installations dealing with private, communal, and public food, feeding and starving. Culminating in a monumentally bloody donner kabapublic sculpture site, dedicated to the Turkish dunner kabab carvers in the streets of Germany.
Landau project for Venice biennale 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.
At the end of 2012 Landau was invited to Be'er Sheba by curator Dalia Manor. She decided to include her new large-scale bronze sculpture “Shelter”. The Kitchen and Living Room Installations, previously shown in Berlin, were brought and fitted to the Negev Museum.
Landau's work is of a bridge maker. [Un]consciously looking for new and vital materials to connect the past to the future, the west to the east, the private with the collective, the sub-existential to the Uber-profound, the found objects to the deepest epic narratives and mythologies… using scattered, broken words to define "the-bricker-brack" and transform it into a soft heap of new dream-buds, to act upon the uncertain horizon.