Koffler Gallery presents a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Sigalit Landau, who creates powerful works investigating the complex realities of her native country, Israel. As part of a significant international tour with presentations in Moscow, Budapest, Tromso and now Toronto, this exhibition brings a selection of Landaus major video works to be shown for the first time in Canada.

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, February 6, 6 - 9 PM.

The notion of endless movement in search of a place of belonging and the indelible wound of a traumatic history as well as a disputed present are central themes in Landaus videos.

Barbed Hula 2000 features the artist spinning a barbed wire hoop around her bare waist, her body creating space for itself within the wounding border. In Day Done 2007, the painting of a black circle around the window of a dilapidated house in south Tel Aviv creates an ambivalent illusion of a wound or target, referencing a custom meant to remember the biblical destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

In DeadSee 2005, Landau confronts the ecological consequences of massive agricultural exploitation that leaves both nature and humanity vulnerable in its wake. Salted Lake 2011 takes the viewer as witness as a pair of shoes encased in crystalized Dead Sea salt slowly melts the frozen surface of a lake in Poland, one of the most charged sites in the memory of Jewish trauma.

Azkelon 2011 proposes interactive exchange through a childrens game of borders on the beach between Gaza, populated mostly by Palestinian refugees, and Ashkelon, established by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. In Laces 2011, a young girl plays a hopeful game underneath a negotiation table while adults discuss potentially serious implications above.

Each one of Landaus video performances contains the offering of a moment of transcendence, the pivotal moment of choice towards an imaginable resolution. Though set up as repeating loops where action endlessly begins and fails in an ostensibly inescapable cycle, the works imply that the solution lies inside the boundaries, not in a breakout. The repetitive, confined movement becomes akin to stillness, summoning transformation from within.

Full details:

http://kofflerarts.org/exhibitions/2013/11/14/sigalit-landau-moving-to-stand-still/