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ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
One man's floor is another man's feelings
The concept of Landau's pieces for the Israeli Pavilion is a line that cuts like barbed wire. She reformulates the saying 'One man's floor is another man's celling'. The point is that everything we do and every decision we make has consequences. Obviously this is a political statement, but as always in Landau's work it is conveyed by poetic and metaphorical means. Landau : I [use many] metaphors relating to food, digestion, and cooking, and I work with the body’s entrances and exits—skin, ears, and tears, the less obvious ones. I use food, digestion, edible components, consistencies, physical phenomena, andmedical terminology in order to explain. Barbed Hula, the one in which I’m in the center of a hula hoop dancing, is about thevagina and wounds in my flesh. At first, I called the work Nest. DeadSee is the one in which I am in the midst of a fruit raftbeing saved from the Dead Sea in a reversed Whirlpool, even though there are no whirlpools in the Dead Sea because, as faras I know, the water is too heavy, and you can’t even drown there. Some of the watermelons are wounded, and one of myeyes is inside the salt water. At first, I called this work Raft. In the third piece, Day Done, I am in a house, painting a circle asfar as my arm goes around a window. The building is damaged. The house is dilapidated and crumbling. Paint won’t help it,and the black paint looks more like a black flag or a fire-and-smoke trace than a DIY job. My act turns the standard windowinto a hole, a wound in the building. As the video progresses and night falls, a man takes my place and paints over my blackmark with a circle of Mediterranean whitewash. A midnight sun rises over the shabby gray house. In all of the films, there isdrama—pain, some death, water or some liquid, a state of alarm—and in all, there is a de-dramatizing positive agent thatcannot undo the harms but introduces sensuality and tenderness into life. All the works are new and they include two video works, an art installation that combines video, sound and an object, several sculptures that will be placed in unexpected places, and a sculpture that will be incorporated into ready-made objects. For the current exhibition, Landau dug a hole in the bottom floor of the pavilion toward the structure's foundations. "This space, locked between the lower tier and the pavilion's middle tier, was discovered by Landau herself 14 years ago," writes Wizgan, in the text that accompanies the exhibition. "Then, too, she bore a hole in that wall and presented a work in the space behind it. In an autobiographical and archaeological move, she returns to that act and to that space and exposes it again." Pobocha : How did you become involved in video, performance, and installation art? Landau : didn’t knowingly move to video. I happened to have a few ideas, which, however I tried, I couldn’t expressin still sculptures. I had a few years of experience with filmmaking and editing in my army service. I had to make educationalfilms to help new soldiers in hard situations. This kind of creativity damaged my being, and I didn’t manage to finish myservice, so I was dismissed earlier than planned, but not early enough. I always made installations. I attribute my attraction toinstallation to my love of the stage, a fascination with archeology, and the influence of Paul McCarthy and Louise Bourgeois.The only real performance that I’ve ever done was the sugar transformations piece at the Thread Waxing Space. It had to takeplace before the visitors’ eyes because sugar melts and transforms so quickly, which dictated a month and a half of thatching,spinning, and cocooning audiences in real time, for whole days. The rest of my performances have been for the camera and.
Curatori : Jean de Loisy, Ilan Wizgan Artisti : Sigalit Landau
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