FRANCE / PARIS: SIGALIT LANDAU " SOIL NURSING ", 2012

until Wed. July 25 2012
Galerie Kamel Mennour
T : +33 1 56 24 03 63
47 rue saint andré des arts
75006 Paris
France

Kamel Mennour present “Soil Nursing”, Sigalit Landau’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Soil Nursing. The wrack of olive trees. If fireflies still exist (as Pasolini so felicitously calls them) then, Sigalit Landau must be one of them.

The artist ushers us into a land of dreams, a sort of Garden of Eden. We find ourselves in the midst of a fable, in an olive grove in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. Poetic and dreamlike, “Soil Nursing”, an exhibition at the Kamel Mennour Gallery, features photographs, videos and sculptures, which represent the points of tension towards which the intimate and the political, the collective and the individual converge, in order to do battle and devastate the customary lines of demarcation.

Sigalit Landau has accustomed us to putting them to the test at the Dead Sea in Israel: this maternal and metaphorical motif in her work is linked to the stream of consciousness, flowing backward and forward, far from stable boundaries, from the fixities of life, from the annoyances of identity. From her exceptional symbolic and political offering for the 2011 Venice Biennale we retain inviolable memories of the implementation of force in her project to construct a bridge made of salt between Israel and Jordan.

Sigalit Landau would have agreed with Virginia Woolf that she was going to wage her “Great War… waged on behalf of things like stones, jars, wreckage at the bottom of the sea…”*
. "Soil Nursing" establishes a metaphor related to the ground, for it is the solid ground which inspires the artist here. A ground to protect – one that belongs to an olive grove in the Revivim kibbutz. In Hebrew, the process of harvesting olives is called Masik; it is the name of one of the three films and the subtitle of her photographs. Sigalit Landau explains that the same word also means to “draw conclusions”. It is, indeed, up to us to grasp these works: the fables she shows us are constructed in successive layers, built up over a lifetime.}(…)

Soil Nursing. Sigalit Landau believes in radiant beauty against death bearing forces. To people who believe what they see, Sigalit Landau responds with a different fable.
The wrack of the olive trees is a way of drawing close to the “power of grace.”

Diane Watteau, May 2012

* V. Woolf, OEuvres romanesques 1, Traversées, édition établie sous la direction de J.
Aubert, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade», 2012, traduit en note p. 1312
* V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Paris, Gallimard, Folio classique, 1994 (extraits)

Galerie Kamel Mennour