This video has been played inside Israeli pavilion (54th Art Biennale of Venice). At first, GROUNDWATER is an installation in which space resembles a machine room which exposes and demystifies functions, but also supports and enables the functional world above it. Water, according to Landau, is a metaphor for knowledge, truth, and love: real water and absent water, poison water and frozen water, salt water and fresh water all mirror each other in the installation. It also emphasizes the fact that salt water in the sea will never quench thirst. The pipes run across the pavilion's ground floor, a thirsty entity trying to draw water from the earth. Having used water metaphorically for years, this time, for Venice writes the artist I am using it in a more concrete way. The pipes are rooted in the cavernous basement. I knew from my previous work in this building that in order to support the middle level of the building, the architect, Rechter, created a sealed space. A room that 'did not exist', built to serve the other spaces, filled with black earth, obscure like an intestine or like other concealed tunnels of the body. I want it to be seen - both the structure and its assumptions - and better understood. It is the task of art to reveal what has been neglected. I made a hole in the wall of this hidden space and reinvented it so that I could place there the heart of my installation (the pump). The SALT CRYSTAL FISHING NET evokes the native Jaffa fishermen who sold me their fishing nets. They are peaceful people who all share the same Mediterranean sea that is sometimes sweet and kind and sometimes demanding, but they live off what grows under its blue waves, whereas I made this work from the Dead Sea's bitter, heavy liquid. These fishing nets catch magnificent crystals. Beautiful but sterile. A fishing net evokes fertility and life, but here it is caked in deadly amounts of salt. In SALTED LAKE I covered the shoes in heavy salt crystals by suspending them in the saline waters of the Dead Sea. After this, I took them to a frozen lake in the middle of Europe and placed them on the ice. Each shoe melted a big hole in the ice. At night they finally reached the water under the ice and fell into the freshwater lake. From the heights of the third level of the pavilion, they now plummet downwards, burdened with history and gravity. I shot the video in the revolutionary city of Gdansk, so as to connect, as well, with the more recent history of working class solidarity evoked by work shoes says the artist.
