Sigalit Landau

The installation created over the course of 22 months in Landau’s studio in Tel Aviv during the Second Intifada for an exhibition at the Alon Segev Gallery. The gallery was situated in the city center two floors underground.  Visitors to the gallery encountered a completely transformed space.

The first room into which the viewers had stepped in was a small rooftop laundry room, which was turned into a subterranean plantation of fruit made of paper-mâché. The material she chose to create the fruit was the daily Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. The copies which she used were dated starting September 28, 2000 - the day the Second Intifada broke out. Each day of the conflict had thus become a fruit that bore a date, and in some cases, the painful headlines and images could be seen alongside the logo of Haaretz, which means “the land” in Hebrew. Among the ruins, Landau has planted a diary on the floor which contained scrawled lines of handwritten notes in Hebrew. Essentially they were the words describing the conflict that brought about the ruin of the world.