Artsy.net reports: As a child, Sigalit Landau grew up gazing out over the jagged hills of the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea and the distant skyline of Jordan beyond. The lake’s incomparable beauty entranced the prominent Israeli artist, who has returned to it throughout her career, as a metaphor and as a medium.
Landau has created some of her most iconic works in its hypersaline waters, including DeadSee (2005), an 11-minute video in which the artist floats naked among a string of unraveling watermelons. For her more recent salt-dipped sculptures, Landau harnesses the Dead Sea’s salt to act as a catalyst, mutating objects including a violin, children’s shoes, a dreamcatcher, and a noose.
“Salt heals, preserves, hides, kills,” Landau told me, explaining her attraction to salt for its paradoxical qualities as much as its chemical properties. “This specific lake has myths and [pre]history all around its shores, stories of radicalism, Christianity, heroics, unbelievable agriculture—and it is a border as well, so the behaviour of salt and the natural environment is highly metaphoric, and keeps changing direction as I experiment.”
Once thought to be devoid of life, the Dead Sea is a completely unique ecological system and the lowest point on earth, at -429 meters below sea level.
Recently, after the closure of Ein Gedi beach—its last public beach and once the largest public beach on the lake’s shores—there has been cause for major environmental concerns. The damming of its two tributaries, The Jordan River and the Yarmouk River, together with the unrelenting Middle Eastern sun, and intense harvesting of magnesium, potash and other minerals in Israel and Jordan have led to accelerated evaporation; much of its southern area is now gouged by sinkholes that have been appearing since the 2000s, destroying beaches and rendering roads inaccessible.
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