Sigalit Landau and her video artwork at the Solyanka Gallery in Moscow

Last Moscow Thursday I had a chance to visit Sigalit Landau retrospective opening at the Solyanka Gallery. I was truly impressed by her video work and felt sorry that I didn't manage to encounter with it earlier on Venice Biennale in 2011, where she presented an installation in the Israeli pavilion. 

Metaphoric and narrated, some of her work obtains a form in a medium of film. While she continually looks into reoccuring themes, their result is highly visual. Sensual, vibrant and full, they are not only a journey towards exploration of particular issues, but possess particular visual qualities, which are powerful both bodily and incorporeal.

DeadSee, 2005
Original Image Here

DeadSee, 2005
Original Image Here

The movement of the depicted within the frame of the video is one of those things I find highly aesthetic in her work. She creates a comprehensive image, which does not obtain motion, but throughout the time forms a continuous sequence or series of images of their own. And so, it seems like there is a natural articulation in universal notion of cycle. Circular image turns into centrifugally unfolding spiral, moving within the volume of the sea. In the latter the changing pattern of light filmed from underneath the water reminds about the recurring pattern of the movement of the waves, governed by the cosmic bodies according to particular cycles. I believe this immersion in the sea evokes a desire for meditative contemplation of the universal image.

Under the Dead Sea, 2005
Original Image Here

The nature of the abjects she films brings in particular colours and light to her work. While being on the plane of the video screen, they are spatial and engulfing, immersing the human body into the depths of the sea and presenting their relation within each other.

Standing on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea, 2005
Original Image Here

DeadSee, 2005
Original Image Here

Being so visually pleasant and mouthwateringly colourful, her works they are fleshy and tangible. Using salt, she preserves watermelons, and the imagination of the taste of the contradiction between the sweetest watermelons and saltest sea water clashes the senses.

The Dining Hall, 2007
 Original Image Here

I believe that her works are so touching and sensual not only because of multilayered narratives within them, but also because of the objects she choses to work with: flesh of the fruit, salt and her own body.