Sigalit Landau
Barbed Hula
2000

This act of desensitization – spinning a hula hoop of barbed wire – is performed at sunrise on a southern beach of Tel-Aviv, where fishermen and old people come to start their day and exercise. The beach is the only calm and natural border Israel has. Danger is generated from history into life and into the body. In this video loop Sigalit Landau performs a hula belly dance. This is a personal and senso-political act concerned with invisible, sub-skin borders, surrounding the body actively and endlessly. All of Landau’s work relates, in one way or another, to a loss of orientation. The pain here is escaped by the speed of the act, and the fact that the spikes of the barbed wire are mostly turned outwards.

Sigalit Landau was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1969, and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem between 1990 to 1995. During this time she also participated in a one-semester student exchange program, at the Cooper Union School of Art and Design, New York. After several years in London, she settled in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she currently lives and works. Landau has represented Israel in the Venice International Art Biennial in 1997 and in 2011, and participated in numerous international exhibitions, among them Documenta X, Kassel, 1997 and the Armory Show, New York, 2005.