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Orla by Sigalit Landau
About the Work
Orla is a limited edition photographic print derived from Sigalit Landau’s 2000-04 project, Somnambulin/Bauchaus, in which the artist transformed a truck-mounted concrete mixer into a traveling music box, from which she distributed popsicles in the shape of the Little Matchstick Girl. It is an interpretation of the Hans Christian Andersen story in which, on a cold New Year’s Eve, a poor girl tries to sell matches in the street, and must light them to warm herself. She strikes one match after another, eventually freezing to death.
Landau says of the project: “The counter-lullaby tour, in which orally and morally I attempt to bring her back to life by feeding her to the living, was about contemporary survival and the perpetual loss of love.”
About the Artist
Selected to represent Israel at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Tel Aviv-based artist Sigalit Landau employs performance, installations, objects, and films to examine philosophical and political questions rooted in her homeland. Her work can be both challenging and poetic. Her 2007 series, Cycle Spun, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, included both the short video Barbed Hula, in which the artist performs using a hula-hoop fashioned from barbed wire, and DeadSee, depicting the artist floating nude in a spiral of watermelons, the green of the skin and vivid red of the flesh contrasting with the azure blue of the water, which comes to dominate the screen as the watermelons slowly float away.
Her work is perhaps best summed up in the following description: “Sigalit Landau has been scratching the surfaces for over two decades. But the bruises are still open; the pain doesn’t seem to ease. She spreads salt crystals on open injuries, blends them in sugar, covers them in papier-mâché, immerses them in the dead sea. But their bloody presence is always here.”
Landau has shown extensively at venues and fairs including the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; PS1 MoMA, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; Documenta X; and the 1997 Venice Biennale. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstwerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
Sigalit Landau produced Orla, a still from the video, in support of Participant Inc.
