Enjoy MoMA's Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series

The works can be viewed as either a triptych or a trilogy shown simultaneously. On view March 19 through July 28, 2008, the exhibition is part of the Museum's ongoing Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series and is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art. The newly titled Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is named after the Museum's late trustee who was a great supporter of contemporary art. The Elaine Dannheisser Foundation has been a key sponsor of the Projects series for many years.

"Over the last decade, Sigalit Landau has explored her native country with performative, sculptural, and video works. The project conceived for MoMA brings together these elements in an installation visually connected by circular forms that evoke a multilayered field of imagery. Barbed wire forms a hula-hoop around the artist's torso, barbed wire submerged in the Dead Sea is covered with salt crystals, a spiral of watermelons in the Dead Sea serves as a backdrop for her body, and the act of painting circles around a window in her Tel Aviv studio is seemingly endless," states Mr. Biesenbach.

In the wall-sized projection DeadSee, a cord connects 500 green watermelons, creating a 19-foot (six meter) spiral-shaped raft on the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea. Secured within this sculptural configuration, Landau floats with an arm outstretched toward a collection of the fruits that have been cut, revealing an intense red flesh. The floating raft gradually unfurls, leaving the surface of the water nearly monochromatic blue, and the artist's body exposed.

For Barbed Hula, a ring of barbed wire makes continual revolutions around the artist's bare torso. The barbs graze her flesh, compromising the integrity of her body. Enacted on the Mediterranean coast at sunrise, her body movements echo the rhythm of the waves in a ritualistic repetition.

Day Done reinterprets an ancient Jewish custom in which an isolated area of a newly built house is intentionally left unpainted or unfinished to symbolize the remembrance of destruction. The video documents an inverse gesture—the painting of a circle around a window from inside the house, marking it first with a black stain and then, as night falls, tracing over the mark in white.

In addition to the three videos that make up Cycle Spun, the gallery is lit by Barbed Salt Lamps (2007), a cluster of handcrafted barbed-wire objects that hover like clouds of chandeliers overhead. These works have been repeatedly submerged in the Dead Sea and dried in the desert sun, resulting in a multilayered, crystalline glaze through which they emit a frosted glow.

Sigalit Landau studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 1997, she represented the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and participated in documenta X. Past solo exhibitions include The Dining Hall at KW (Kunst-Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2007); Treading Water at Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2005); The Endless Solution at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2004); and CARS at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2004). She has participated in such international group exhibitions as Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007); Into Me/Out of Me at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, KW (Kunst-Werke), and MACRO in Rome (2006); The Raft of the Medusa at the National Museum Warsaw (2006); and The Ten Commandments at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden (2004). -- www.moma.org