Sigalit Landau b. 1969

This work is in very good condition.
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The subject of a recent solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Sigalit Landau has established herself as one of the foremost contemporary Israeli artist's of her day. Her work is always challenging, coaxing the spectator to engage in the experience of interpretation, it is also political, but although relating to the conflicts in her land of birth the message is never of the locale but of a universal manner. Ariella Azoulay discusses in great detail the present work and tells us that Landau bought a pair of scales during the second intifada from a Palestinian merchant in the Old City. 'The modern artistic gesture is based on the displacement of objects from their context or use into the context of art. In the latter, the object is usually stripped of its previous functions and uses, acquiring new features that enable it to become an object of reflection and display. Its very displacement from one context to another is usually what is at stake. So in our case, I would rather look first at the act of buying the scales, and only then at the object itself. During her wandering in the market, the artist purchased scales she had no intention of using...The mutual recognition between merchant and buyer, on the reliability of the scales as a weighing instrument, is transformed here into a recognition shared by an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, that the scales are to be retired and declared unusable. Thus, by creating the Scales of Injustice, the artist reinstated the scales with their initial function: to prove, demonstrate, show.' (Ariella Azoulay, 'The Threshold of Life, the Threshold of Justice: On two figures in Sigalit Landau's work' in Gabriele Horn & Ruth Ronen (eds.), Sigalit Landau, Berlin, 2008, pp. 190-191).