

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION
"A cord of 250 meters penetrates 500 watermelons forming a 6 meter spiral raft in the saturated salt waters of the Dead Sea. The spiral turns as a whirlpool in reverse from its normal direction. I am floating locked inside the layers of the spiral, between the center and the periphery of the sweet raft. I am reaching out against the direction of the turning raft towards a small area where the fruit is wounded, red, and exposed, like me, to the sting of the salt. The salt solution of the Dead Sea enables everything to float. The spiral gradually becomes a thin green line abandoning the frame. "DeadSee" was first exhibited as part of "The Endless Solution" installation at the Helena Rubinstein pavilion, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, January-May 2005. The film was shot in mid August 2004 in the area of Sodom south of Masada." Sigalit Landau (sigalitlandau.com)
Perhaps the most well-known work from The Endless Solution, Sigalit Landau’s most important exhibition/installation thus far, DeadSee is also recognized as the work occupying the center floor of the Israeli gallery at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Ilan Wizgan discusses The Endless Solution and the importance of this video work: “Her most comprehensive installation to date… took place in 2005 at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art under the charged titled The Endless Solution – both the title and contents of which implicitly and explicitly alluded to the Jewish Holocaust. Landau created a remote hostile living habitat, peopled by a Sisyphean community occupied with overcoming and surviving some undisclosed disaster, and making a new start. She transformed the huge space to simulate another place (the environs of the Dead Sea) and an indefinable period… The video work included in this exhibition was created for that charged installation and symbolizes infinity, the breaking of a knot, the desalination of the Dead Sea through the sweetness of watermelons, perhaps even the triumph of Good over Evil. Directly referencing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), installed in Utah’s Salt Lake and signifying the superimposition of Culture onto a natural setting (a piece which was later finally consumed back by Nature), it also brings to mind a lesser known piece by Dganit Berest, an Israeli artist of a generation earlier. In a work exhibited in 1975, Berest had drawn a spiral against the backdrop of a photograph, with a quote from American artist Bruce Nauman which can also be read as a motto for Landau’s work: ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.’” (Ilan Wizgan in Territotial Bodies Contemporary Sculpture from Israel, Beelden aan Zee Museum, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2008, p. 96).