ONE MAN’S FLOOR IS ANOTHER MAN’S FEELINGS BY SIGALIT LANDAU for the israeli pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale 2011

Curated by Jean de Loisy and Ilan Wizgan, Israeli artist Sigalit Landau’s political and environmental installation One Man’s Floor is Another Man’s Feelings
presents a series of video, sculpture and image imbued with symbolic
gesture. Landau’s work is set around the lowest place on earth – the
Dead Sea – one that is scene to an ongoing ecological disaster. Pipes
run across the Pavilion’s ground floor, in a series of installations
such as The Cave and Water Ladders where these
core irrigation systems stage water as message of life and knowledge, whether
it be frozen, salt, fresh, poison or absent. In her film Salted Lake,
worker’s shoes covered in the heavy salt crystals in the water of the
Dead Sea melt into the frozen lake in the revolutionary European city of
Gdansk. In Azkelon, a “knife game” is staged, the title of the
film a hybrid of neighboring towns Aza (Gaza) and Ashkelon which share a
beach though separated by a border. Beyond her installations and most
radical is Landau’s unique proposal to the Jordanian and Israeli
governments to construct a bridge that would connect the two
countries across the Dead Sea using salt pillars and crystals. Her
extensive research into water and crystallisation processes would this
time create a crystal bridge, not only serving the borders of
co-existence but also defining a focal space for the political,
ecological and economic crisis. Landau’s work becomes the metaphor for
the volatile tensions of the Middle East, one that powerfully progresses
the unbreakable ties between the poles of nature, man and survival. Text Sophie Pinchetti and photo Olivier Zahm

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