Gimme shelter

Sigalit Landau opens house in her new exhibition in Beersheba.

By RACHEL MARDER
Landau’s ‘Shelter’ piece 521 (photo credit: Yotam Frum)
Landau’s ‘Shelter’ piece 521
(photo credit: Yotam Frum)
Sigalit Landau doesn’t purport to be a prophet.
The video and sculpture installation artist had no idea when her exhibition debuting a bronze caste of a shelter opened in Beersheba in September that rockets would soon be flying overhead.
But she says artists do tend to have an innate sixth sense, their consciousness inexplicably one step ahead of everyone else’s.
Still, she couldn’t have anticipated the response her monumental sculpture Shelter, a massive bronze cast of a defunct bomb shelter from south Tel Aviv, would elicit from southern viewers at the Negev Museum of Art. During a recent gallery talk she climbed the stairs into the elevated structure as audience members asked her how she knew about the imminent danger, thanking her for lending them her protection.
“What are you talking about?” she answered. “I’m saying we’re all living in a place, it’s a land that’s called our shelter and it’s the task of all of us to find normality independent of any leaders or enemies or so-called enemies.”
Landau
Landau
We live within insecure borders but we believe them to be safe because shelter is a state of mind, she says.
Standing in the warmth of Landau’s south Tel Aviv studio, listening to the pounding rain and thunder outside, I too felt sheltered by her from the cold. Having arrived for the interview about 10 minutes early (what kind of Israeli journalist arrives early, she asked me), my socks and shoes were soaked. Surveying me, Landau, blonde, lithe and bouncing around her industrial yet harmonious studio, immediately laid my socks out to dry by a heater and offered me a pair of soft white slippers. What kind of artist keeps extra slippers on hand in her studio? Her “Caryatid” exhibition – named for the ancient Greek female statues that served as building pillars, follows her “One Man’s Floor is Another Man’s Feelings” show at the Venice Biennale in June 2011, and comes seven years after her “Endless Solution” exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
For “One Man’s Floor,” Landau, 43, created a huge piping system, employing the same pipes Mekorot, the national water carrier, uses, running water in a closed circle, like blood through arteries. The name of the piece was Administration Blood.
The exhibition largely centered on the Dead Sea, which she has called her partner. For one installation, she filmed a pair of boots, which beautifully crystallized in salt after she left them in the sea, sinking slowly into a lake in Gdansk.
Landau may be best known for her 2005 video Dead- See, on display at the Israel Museum. A 250-meter cord penetrates 500 watermelons leading them into a spiral surrounding Landau’s nude body, floating in the Dead Sea. The result is a mesmerizing work of piercingly bright colors. Her Barbed Hula (2000) video also rippled through the international art world. The slow-motion image of a barbed-wire hula-hoop circling her bare torso on an Israeli beach recalls early religious rituals and bloody rites, stigmata and sacrifice.
Landau has said she used herself in these works because she could not ask a dancer or actor to exhaust or reveal herself that way.
In the past, she has focused on the natural world, its intersection with politics and on building bridges between art mediums as well as peoples, launching an inititiave in conjunction with her Venice show to build a salt bridge between Jordan and Israel via the Dead Sea. The project is progressing, she says, as she has met with engineers and ambassadors on both sides.
Behind the couch
Behind the couch
“In Venice, I did lift my gaze, and I said, this is symbolic... a stagnant sea is really very much mutual to at least two countries: Jordan and Israel.”
Around her studio, she works with the brute strength of a construction worker, with power tools, but also with a meticulous sense of organization.
“I look down to my feet, down to what I know is mine, trying to make order and find beauty in it,” she says in the interview in her studio, which has hammers, nails, rulers and tools hanging on the walls. She is wearing blue sweatpants, a yellow T-shirt under a brown sweater, and has rings on her fingers.
For the first time, in “Caryatid,” Landau turns inward to explore themes of motherhood, female strength and survival, and her own family’s story.
“It’s a very strange show for people who don’t know me, because it’s autobiographical,” she says.
THE SMALL museum, situated between two Ottoman buildings, has been transformed into a warm, familiar home for the exhibition. On the top floor is a “hang out” kitchen where one can hear audio of women telling their life stories, and a living room relating to Landau’s Uncle Yisrael.
The middle floor is the street entrance and outdoor shelter and the bottom floor features her sculptures, mostly of women, made from salt, papier mâché, bronze and cement. Particularly striking is the Madonna and Child (2011) sculpture of a nursing pillow cast in a beautiful Italian marble. The object appears permanent and unbreakable.
“The nursing pillow in this case would be like a pedestal for motherhood,” says Landau, whose daughter, Imri, is six years old. “It’s something you have to fight for, not necessarily something that’s given and pleasant in itself.”
In the typical, minimalist 1960s-1970s Israeli kitchen (“Golda’s kitchen” complete with jars of salted pickles and watermelon), Landau placed four barstools around a stove, recalling staples from her childhood in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. Playing simultaneously, but also on their own is the audio from interviews she conducted with four women, whom she calls Iris, Sarah, Rose and Lily. They come from different places but all live in Israel, and tell their stories in their different accents – Israeli, New York, Kurdish and Eastern European. She describes the kitchen as chaotic and Macbethian. One became a kibbutznik, another was beaten by her husband throughout her marriage, the third survived the Holocaust and the last grew up in a cultured, agricultural family in Zichron Ya’akov.
If you’re listening, you’ll catch some very interesting stories. “If you’re not listening, you’re thinking there’s a meeting between a very wealthy [woman], a very poor [woman], a very agricultural [woman], a very social kind of impossible meeting of these four mothers,” she says.
But what do they all share? Survival, and a practical dispostion.
Landau, admiringly, says she has much to learn from these women, who raised their families after World War II, about motherhood and inner strength.
“I didn’t address these things before my daughter was born. Sometimes I was in relationships, sometimes I was out of relationships.
I mainly decided where to live in the world going by my next show. But I think I’m talking to them, more or less as an alien, trying to figure out how they did it, knowing that the 20th century and the 21st century is not the same deal, not for women and not for anybody.”
Families move apart and the once supportive social structure that individuals had for centuries has diminished, if not crumbled for many.
From the kitchen, one then walks into the living room, which is also a familiar sight for anyone who lived in Israel 30 to 50 years ago.
Landau never knew her grandmothers, but she did have aunts and a step-grandmother.
Her memories of their domestic, Eastern European homes served as the model for this room. The details are exquisite and homely; the well-known fold-out sofa, the tapestries on the wall, from Landau’s family, the bright carpet – all pieces she gathered together.
When they are not your blood relatives, as these women were not, Landau says you remember details more acutely, as she longed to feel at home and not always like a guest.
“Even there I was not really at home, but it’s very strong for me, the memories,” she says.
The room’s pastoral ambiance is broken, however, when one peers behind the couch.
Half sliding out from under it is a to-scale photograph of the Mount Herzl gravestone of her Uncle Yisrael, who survived the camps, but died at age 16 when he committed suicide in the IDF.
At 17, Landau discovered her troubled uncle’s diaries.
“This guy, he was a rebel, and he was very much looking for women, looking for himself,” she says. “I think his homelessness was felt in my life without knowing of him because he really didn’t want to be in Youth Aliya... he didn’t want to be a kibbutznik.”
Her uncle, she says, had a difficult relationship with his father and felt rejected by the woman he loved, so he paid a doctor to lie about his age so he could enlist. But there too, where he cleaned toilets and the like, he didn’t find his niche.
On a television set in the living room pages from Uncle Yisrael’s diary scroll downward.
“From the point of view of the viewer of the show, [one] doesn’t know that he’s considering suicide all along. His last day, he says, ‘I’ve been living in this country for two and a half years. I can’t go back and I can’t be here.”
After a guard on watch duty caught him sneaking out, he was ordered to stand before a military court after lunch the next day.
“They go to lunch and then he kills himself,” she says.
The empty kitchen and empty living room are symbolic for Landau, expressing desertion, when all these women hoped to achieve was to build a home in a new homeland.
But instead they are left alone with feelings of failure and remorse for losing one of their own. Like her, she says, Uncle Yisrael was also a guest and felt like a disappointment to them.
“They felt guilty because they were criticizing him,” she says. “They were trying their best to survive this immigration and this kid is just the subject of everything that’s not right.”
This theme of being a guest in one’s home, a place that is meant to shelter, relates, Landau feels, also to her mother, who made aliya in the 1960s from London, and died in 2004.
“I saw my mother as a guest in a way,” she says. Her Hebrew ability was limited and she never quite understood Israel. Her father, 71, also made aliya, but from Romania.
For Landau, who had planned to be a dancer, once she hit adolescence she felt herself not fitting in conventionally.
“Reading [my uncle’s] diary was like the last stamp I needed to understand that I don’t know exactly how I belong socially,” she says.
In the army, she worked on films about how soldiers psychologically responded to serving in Gaza. But she left after a year and a half, when she experienced an emotional breakdown.
“There was something in my psyche that I couldn’t finish the army like a good girl,” she says.
Years later, Landau still feels connected to her outsider uncle.
“When I realized I am intertwined with this guy, I gave the title of this whole installation of the living room [as] lareshet.”
It has a double meaning: reshet meaning net, and lareshet meaning to inherit, together expressing a feeling of being trapped in one’s family history.
The women Landau looks to – the heroic female sculptures on the first floor, the persevering women telling their stories in the kitchen and the aunts who created pristine living rooms for their families, are like the Caryatides, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Remembering her family and showing their story was not easy.
“I let myself. I let it come to life,” she says.
“You need lots of love around you to even try to turn a story like this into art.” ■