Sigalit Landau

Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

A trilogy – or perhaps triptych – of performative films, Sigalit Landau’s current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is built around the motif of circling.  Centrifugal movement is at the heart of each of the videos on view, which collectively examine the function and structure of ritual.  Linked to this idea of ritual is the notion of formation; together these elements act as the aesthetic and also dramatic underpinning of Landau’s work.

The gallery also features a sculptural installation, Barbed Salt Lamps (2007), but the centrepiece of the exhibition is Landau’s monumental DeadSee (2005), a video in which Landau floats in the middle of a coil of watermelons.  The coil slowly unravels; the hypnotic effect of this slow undoing is intensified by the arrival of the anticipated moment where Landau’s body floats free of the circular formation. 

The moment is – particularly given the narrative simplicity of the piece – surprisingly dramatic.  That drama has much to do with the visual effect of Landau’s body, floating adrift on the lush monochrome of the water.  But it is also linked to the way in which DeadSee reverberates with the other two video works in the exhibition, Barbed Hula (2000) and Day Done (2007).  In each of these works, Landau examines the manner in which ritual functions, and also what occurs at the psychological moment when ritual and formation comes undone.

Both Barbed Hula and Day Done explicitly reference the language of ritual.  In Barbed Hula, Landau stands naked on a beach, a hoop of barbed wire circling and cutting into her flesh; in Day Done, a black circle is painted and then painted over again on the exterior of a house, the second time in white.  The language of circularity provides a certain formal consistency to the exhibition, but the real emphasis of the work seems to lie in the evocation of ritual’s mystery, and also the erasure of the ritual itself.

If Barbed Hula is implicitly about markings and scars, then Day Done is about the erasing of those same marks.  But Landau is not simply formulating the erasure of social ritual and its (often painful) constrictions; DeadSee captures both the terror and the freedom of being liberated from those constraints.  It is not unlike a process of birthing, both visually and conceptually.  Finally, the psychological and social ramification of that moment, both its uncanny terror and its exhilaration, is operating in these works.

Katie Kitamura