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Innovator

Orit Wolf performing in Ashdod. Photo by D. Miller

Award-winning Israeli musician Orit Wolf believes that to survive in the 21st century business world, ‘you have to be amazing, just like a performer.’

Israeli concert pianist Orit Wolf was barely out of her teens when disaster struck 12 minutes into a live recording and concert in Jerusalem: She blanked out and froze.

“I was always told ‘the show must go on’ but nobody told me how to do that, how to turn a mistake into an opportunity and how to improvise. I stopped the music and it was such a shameful occasion,” recalls Wolf.

Today, the poised pianist performs across the world and leads internationally sought-after workshops using music to teach businesses innovation, problem-solving, management, public speaking, coping with change, the power of persuasion and the art of disruption.

“I realized that if I want to be on stage I’ve got to have the right tools to turn any mistake into something beautiful. So I started to learn composition and improvisation and it was like buying an insurance policy that no matter what happens I can go on and do a lovely performance even if I don’t have my notes or forgot the music or the piano is really bad, or my hands are sweaty or the audience is noisy,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

Her research following that ruined concert convinced her that “there was something in music-making that could give insights to so many professions on how to go on no matter what happens.”

Wolf was only 23 when an executive from Israeli pharma giant Teva audited one of her classes at Tel Aviv University about music and innovation, and persuaded her to start lecturing to businesses.

Over the past decade, she’s worked with banks, insurance companies, colleges and firms such as Verint, Matrix, Check Point, Strauss, Coca-Cola, HP, IBM, Bayer, Lilly, FedEx and Netafim. Her concert lectures have taken her to countries including Holland, Switzerland, England, Germany, Spain and Austria. This fall she’s returned to her alma mater, the Royal Academy of Music in London, to teach a course called “Leadership for Stage Performers.”

Below is a presentation Wolf gave at the UK Marketing Society’s 2014 annual conference.

“I don’t teach strategies you can read in a book,” Wolf says. “I give tools to create disruptions, to improvise and deliver your message in a more experienced and inspiring way. To survive in the 21st century you have to be amazing, just like a performer. It’s easy to show on the piano how you can take the same text or score and transform it.”

In one exercise, Wolf asks participants to write on paper for three minutes and to make intentional spelling mistakes. She then analyzes results in a 45-minute presentation.

“What we learn is that the average person makes 20 mistakes in 40 words. People who make more mistakes than words, say 20 words with 40 mistakes, are less afraid to break paradigms. And what kind of mistakes they make shows different ways of breaking the paradigm. It’s very interesting for me to see how far people are allowing themselves to go.”

Another exercise has the group telling an improvised story passed from one to the next, in which every other word must be spoken in a different language. For example, instead of “good morning” you might say “good boker.”

“I have about 80 different exercises like those to break your paradigms on emotional, mental and cognitive levels. We create a situation where you will not be afraid to be cognitively embarrassed. This trains you to have the courage and self-confidence to deliver your next presentation beautifully even if you have technical problems.”

Born leader

Orit Wolf persuaded her parents to send her for piano lessons when she was six. Gifted in many areas, she finished high school at 16 and by age 23 had acquired a bachelor’s degree from Boston University on full scholarship, a master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Music and a PhD from Bar-Ilan University, along with numerous piano awards.

She then taught innovation through music at Tel Aviv University for eight years despite never having studied leadership, marketing or business management.

“I’m dedicating my life to showing people things they can do to become more creative and how to leave an unforgettable mark in whatever it is they do.”

Orit Wolf in duet with opera singer Assaf Kacholi. Photo: courtesy

When the university discontinued her award-winning course for budgetary reasons, she was jolted out of one of her own paradigms – the false sense of job security – and turned her disappointment into an opportunity to do concert lectures.

“I started in a small Jaffa museum with 60 subscribers in 2006. Now I have over 4,000 annual subscribers for eight series I perform at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Auditorium, Rehovot, Ashdod and Ra’anana,” says Wolf, who encourages audiences to record, photograph, share and tweet her performance as long as their phones are in silent mode.

She also has a new series for English-speakers, Music and Muse, at Weil Auditorium in Kfar Shmaryahu.

Wolf confides that on occasion she takes her seven- and nine-year-old children to her concerts instead of school.

“The idea of obeying rules all the time, I think, is wrong. Breaking rules sometimes helps people think more clearly and changes how they look at things.”

For more information, click here.

Award-winning Israeli concert pianist teaches managers to disrupt and innovate

Band-aids, a telltale sign that Tel Aviv street artist Dede was here.  Photo courtesy Israel21c — Band-aids, a telltale sign that Tel Aviv street artist Dede was here. Photo courtesy Israel21c

With numerous commissions and exhibitions, consumer products and documentaries, Israel’s renowned street artists are in the limelight worldwide.

By Abigail Klein Leichman

When Israeli street artists are exhibiting in galleries here and abroad, when their work stars in videos and walking tours, when makers of clothing and furniture are incorporating their urban designs, you know that graffiti has grown up.

“Seeing the street art in Tel Aviv is a major activity on the list for tourists,” says street artist Mitchell Blickman, founder of the Tel Aviv Street Art & Graffiti website.

“A lot of the people who have been doing in-the-dark street art a long time have actually been becoming more refined, doing exhibitions and commissioned work for bars and clubs, even high-end galleries,” Blickman tells ISRAEL21c, citing examples such as Dioz, Know Hope (Addam Yekutieli), Adi Sened and Mas.

DIOZ’s bold murals cover entire walls of Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood. Photo by Abigail Klein Leichman

The Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentin is the epicenter of Israeli street art. You can see it on the walls, in the parks, and in galleries such as Urban Secret Gallery, Tiny Tiny, Under 1000 and Meshuna.

However, it would be a mistake to overlook street-art culture in other Israeli cities, as some of these artists are getting international recognition as well.

Top billing in this category goes to psych-pop collective Broken Fingaz Crew of Haifa.

Broken Fingaz and other established Haifa crews, like 048 and NRC, have inspired a younger generation to go outside and paint. Now in their late 20s and early 30s, Broken Fingaz members Desa, Kip, Tant and Unga spend half the year doing exhibitions and commissions in cities such as Los Angeles, London, Rome, Berlin, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Amsterdam, Chengdu, Osaka and Hong Kong.

Broken Fingaz’ Unga recently did this drawing in Hong Kong. Photo via Facebook

Speaking to ISRAEL21c from Tokyo, Unga said the crew is “figuring out what we want to say when we’re inside; it’s a different aesthetic or overall approach. Just taking something you did outside and putting it inside doesn’t always work, because street art and graffiti is all about context. Inside, you have to find a way to do something strong enough that can stand alone without the context of the street. So we jump in the water and try new stuff. It’s important to keep things interesting.”

Broken Fingaz’ “Reality Check” exhibit in Rome’s Gallery Varsi. Photo by Blind Eye Factory

Shutters and shoes

Solomon Souza, 23, has attracted media attention for spray-painting some 200 shop shutters so far in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market (shuk) with portraits of everyone from his grandmother to Bob Marley to famous Israeli Muslims, Christians and Druze.

“We try to pick characters that would inspire anyone,” Souza tells ISRAEL21c.

This Solomon Souza work in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market was sketched out by his mum. Photo by Abigail Klein Leichman

Souza also sprays in downtown Jerusalem and hipster neighborhood Nachlaot and in the cities of Safed (Tzfat) and Tel Aviv.

Souza says he’d love to collaborate with other Israeli street artists such as One Love of Ashdod and Spine B7 of Beersheva.

A work of Spine B7 of Beersheva. Photo via Facebook

French lifestyle brand Bensimon has introduced three new shoe models in collaboration with Israeli street artist and designer Pilpeled(Nir Peled), available in Israel and online.

Pilpeled was the first Israeli artist to design a bottle for Absolut vodka, collaborated on a clothing brand with Puma, drew billboards for a Coca-Cola Zero ad campaign, and did two commissioned murals for WeWork Tel Aviv.

ROS, a Bensimon shoe featuring Pilpeled’s signature white eyes.

Trends in street art

A Staypuff work on the streets of Tel Aviv.

The styles and motifs of Israel’s street artists are instantly recognizable to those in the know.

If you see a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or a creatively altered stop sign, it’s a sure bet that Staypuff has been there.

Simian images are the calling card of Wonky Monky.

Stylized Band-Aids on walls in Tel Aviv, London, New York or Berlin indicate Dede, whose new art book can be purchased online and in shops including at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

As the better-known street artists mature beyond the walls of Israel, new ones are taking their place.

A Wonky Monky work. Photo via Elishavanotes.com

Shay “Tra” Litman, at only 15, has already been the star of a documentary and several exhibitions.

#Tag, working in Florentin, “is mixing classic art with social media, like an image of the Madonna and child taking a selfie,” says Blickman.

Israeli street artist #Tag titled this “Will you take my banana?” Photo: courtesy

Tiny Tiny owner Murielle Cohen, whose puzzle poems, framed dancers and other series appear in Florentin and environs, says up-and-coming artists are even incorporating technology.

“Street art has changed a lot from tagging, from the pioneers with spray cans,” Cohen tells ISRAEL21c. “It evolved to stencil work and images, and now people are doing out-of-the-box things like digital collages, printed out large and pasted onto walls.”

Murielle Cohen with one of her works in Florentin. Photo by Abigail Klein Leichman

Beadwork, knitting and other 3D elements are seen in the works of artists such as Mr. Leaf (Mati Ale) and Yifat Raz, who places patches of velvet or fake grass to create petting corners around Tel Aviv.

Beadwork graffiti by Mr. Leaf in Tel Aviv. Photo via Facebook

As the old carpenter shops and seedy apartments of Florentin are gradually being gentrified out of existence, Cohen says developers plan to incorporate street art to keep the area’s flavor and tourist appeal fresh as was done in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood.

“The world is going in the direction of accepting street art but putting it into a modern context,” says Cohen.

Israeli Street Art: Not Just Writing on the Wall #streetart

Ohad Naharin's "Virus". Photo by Gadi Dagon, courtesy Batsheva Dance Company

Ohad Naharin's "Yag". Photo by Gadi Dagon, courtesy Batsheva Dance Company

Ohad Naharin's "Last Work". Photo by Gadi Dagon, courtesy Batsheva Dance Company

The Batsheva Dance Company performing Ohad Naharin's "Last Work", "Virus" and "Yag" . Photos by Gadi Dagon, courtesy Batsheva Dance Company

The Batsheva Dance Company was founded in 1964 by Batsheva de Rothschild and the revered American dancer Martha Graham, whose brilliant innovations in choreography set the tone for the troupe’s fearlessly experimental work. Today, Batsheva performs around the world, but the company’s home is in the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theater in Tel Aviv. If you are lucky enough to be in the city during their performance season, you may have the opportunity to experience a truly electrifying production. As Mikhail Baryshnikov says of Batsheva: “This group . . . my jaw is on the floor. I never saw the combination of that kind of beauty and energy and technique.”

“It’s what we share, what we have in common, that is very important to encourage and to develop.”

— Ohad Naharin

Ohad Naharin, artistic director of Batsheva, has the ageless presence of a lifelong mover. Although his mother was a dance teacher, Naharin did not begin dancing himself until the age of twenty-two (ancient in dance years). He joined the Batsheva company and within a year was recruited by Martha Graham for her troupe in New York. Naharin remained in the United States for more than a decade, returning to Israel in 1991 when he was invited to become Batsheva’s director.

Naharin’s name is often associated with an approach to dance called “Gaga.” Naharin refers to it as a “movement language”: it’s not a dance technique but a “toolbox”; not something he invented, but something that was discovered. “It was there,” he says, “like the North Pole was there before someone discovered it.” The term (coined long before the appearance of Lady Gaga, he points out) stems from a kind of primal utterance or gibberish—baby talk—in keeping with the Gaga tenet of letting go, not thinking too much. Is it a philosophy, or a movement technique, or a larger approach to life? His response:

All of the above. It has a lot to do with the way I reflect about dance, which I am trying to share with other people. Also with the belief that it’s not about how different we are from each other—I take that for granted. But it’s what we share, what we have in common, that is very important to encourage and to develop. . . .

Gaga is a very particular toolbox that we’re building that has to do with the sense of discovery. It’s a lot about giving dancers and people keys to open up something that exists in them. That’s the beauty of it. This action of opening something is very quick. You can have amazing results if you have the right key. . . . That’s something that happens a lot in Gaga, people with those keys.

The documentary film "In the mind of Ohad Naharin: Mr. Gaga" by Tomer Heymann, debuted this year inspiring viewers "to escape the gravity of the every day life," according to one reviewer.

Batsheva Dance Company >

Batsheva Dance Company Instagram >

Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theater >

Choreographer Ohad Naharin and the Discovery of Gaga

Hip-hop and rap are other musical realms that are at least in part being shaped by the Israeli presence, and here the country’s cross section of cultures is very much in evidence. Hip-hop is largely about borrowing and repurposing, as heard for example in Produx’s “Ichiban,” a hilarious remix from Fiddler on the Roof, and in Nechi Nech’s “Godzilla,” in which “Hava Nagila” is made to rhyme with “Thriller” (as in Michael Jackson). Shadia Mansour (known as the “first lady of Arabic hip-hop”) takes on both Middle East politics and gender stereotyping.

“Hip-hop and rap are other new musical realms are being shaped by the Israeli presence—and here the country’s cross section of cultures is very much in evidence.”

The band Hadag Nahash (“Snake-Fish”) mashes up funk, jazz, world music, and Western pop, while the very popular Israeli-American band Balkan Beat Box fuses traditional Middle Eastern and Balkan sounds, “gypsy punk,” and electronica—really anything from the most ancient folk rhythms to the edgiest trap music—to create an irresistibly percussive and hard-hitting music. (Full disclosure: This author is not an aficionado of hip-hop or other contemporary sounds, but discovered Balkan Beat Box while eating dinner at Jerusalem’s Machneyuda restaurant. There, it isn’t uncommon, late some evenings, for the chefs to exit the kitchen, still in their aprons, and to dance among—and sometimes on—the tables. Balkan Beat Box’s music provides just the right propulsive rhythms for their insanity.)

From Hip-hop to Rap to Electronica to Trap and Beyond

Today, a new institution, the Elstein Music and Arts Center, is a nucleus for both visual and performing arts—the brainchild of Lily Elstein, one of Israel’s most important arts patrons. The enter is part of the Elma Arts Complex, in the historic town of Zichron Ya’acov, on a ridge of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. The main headquarters are in a beautiful building designed by architect Yaakov Rechter, originally as the Mivtachim Sanatorium/Hotel. (Built in 1968, it earned Rechter the prestigious Israel Prize for architecture.) Long, white, and gently curved, it rests horizontally on the hillside—as Lily Elstein herself describes it, “like an instrument: like the keys of a piano or an organ.” The renovated complex, set on nearly thirty acres, includes performance spaces and halls, art galleries and studios, villas to house artists in residence, and a luxurious hotel and spa for visiting audiences.

“I really belong to this place. I belong to the art and the life of art in Israel.”

— Lily Elstein

Elstein is an elegant and gracious woman, with a tenacious streak. Her connection to Zichron Ya’acov is long:standing she was born there, and her late husband, Yoel Moshe Elstein, and she both descended from the town’s fathers. When Elstein expressed an interest in buying the old Mivtachim Hotel, she encountered a number of obstacles, from developers attempting to outbid her to objections against marring the local forest areas with construction. Ultimately, Israel’s High Court of Justice was called in to decide the fate of the land and building. Elstein says: “I explained to them: ‘I am third-generation Zichron Ya’acov. My grandparents were founders, and my parents were born there. I really belong to this place. I belong to the art and the life of art in Israel.’” Ultimately, she overcame them all, and today the Zichron Ya’acov community is well aware that her project is a boon to the area—and to the arts in general in Israel.

Elstein Music and Arts Center, Elma Arts Complex >

The Elstein Music and Arts Center and the Extraordinary Woman Behind It

Photographer Barry Frydlender in a still from the film Out in the World. — Photographer Barry Frydlender in a still from the film *Out in the World.*

As anyone in Israel can attest, time is a preoccupation in this nation and the surrounding region. There are few topics that do not hearken back to ancient eras, and while the future is on everyone’s minds, history seems remarkably flexible, open to any number of perfectly viable versions of truth.

“There’s a hidden history in every image.”

— Barry Frydlender

Photographer Barry Frydlender has chosen to disregard the constraints of immediacy and the burden of history and instead engages time by practicing what might be called a “durational” form of photography. His images—composites made up of dozens, sometimes hundreds of individual visual facets—may evolve over a period of months in the making and the editing. The results are hyper-detailed vistas printed on a vast scale, often bringing us into the streets and social circumstances of Israel. “There’s a hidden history in every image,” says Frydlender.

It might be said that to photograph anything in Israel is to take a political position, so charged is the terrain with controversy. But Frydlender seems to maintain an observer’s detachment, even when his work is dealing with a topic as volatile as territory: his Israeli panoramas include Muslims and Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, secular and religious, young and old. In this sense, his photographs testify to a land of many peoples and faiths and types, interconnected by the situation of this country.

Frydlender is meticulous in constructing his visual assemblages, which are stitched together with the help of his computer. He finds meaning in each of the many pieces of his “mosaics”—shaking up traditional ideas of centrality and focus. In the film Out in the World, he explains to a group of young photographers that each piece in his iconic 2003 photograph The Flood has its own center point: the viewer’s eye can land anywhere and find fulfillment.

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

Photographer Barry Frydlender and his work in a still from the film Out in the World. — Photographer Barry Frydlender and his work in a still from the film *Out in the World.*

Barry Frydlender: Exploring Time Through Photographs

A still of artist Sigalit Landau welding in the film Out in the World

Out in the World is a film about four artists making an impact on the international scene: Sigalit Landau, Barry Frydlender, Micha Ullman, and Michal Rovner. These artists embrace what seems to be an ongoing theme among Israeli artists: finding inspiration even in the dark and troubling aspects of life, forging from them works of art that help us, if not to reconcile, then to begin to understand.

“Four artists making an impact on the international scene.”

Sigalit Landau explores her own body and the body politic in myriad media from sculpture to striking performances captured on video. Barry Frydlender is a photographic artist who assembles painstakingly crafted image “mosaics” that comment on time and place. Micha Ullman’s multi-faceted, minimalist sculptures often make use of the orange-red sand of the Sharon area north of Tel Aviv. And Michal Rovner’s monumental stone structures are at the center of her thinking and her art.

The stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

The Film: "Out in the World"

Nihad Dabeet’s Healer (2011), iron wire. Photo courtesy Avital Moses

Sculptor Nihad Dabeet keeps a studio in Ramle, where he spent most of his childhood before being accepted, as a young teen, to the prestigious Thelma Yellin School of the Arts, and subsequently moving to Bulgaria, with a scholarship to study sculpture at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. Dabeet has remained devoted to his work through easy times as well as rough ones, always staying circumspect. His work plays a crucial role in all this; for an artist, he says, “it’s very easy to go from bad place to good place. It’s more difficult to go from good place to bad place.”

“Dabeet’s fascinating forms are hybrids of figuration and abstraction, the hand-wrought and the organic.”

Over the years, Dabeet has experimented with various media, including discarded building materials (“rubbish” is his technical term for it), eventually honing a distinctive style of working with thick strands of wire, which he describes as “weaving.” The fascinating forms he renders seem to be hybrids of figuration and abstraction, the hand-wrought and the organic. For the Korin Maman Museum in Ashdod he created a extraordinary life-size sculpture of a horse for a show called Horses and Bulls. Though made of steel wires, it looks almost like a magnificent armature made of fine bentwood twigs.

For Dabeet, beauty is only a beginning in art: it is “the first link,” he says. “But you must also have persuasion.” He says he believes in finding what is good and useful in even the most trying circumstances.

Thelma Yellin School of the Arts >

Korin Maman Museum
16 Hashayatim Street, Ashdod

The Remarkable Wire Sculptures of Nihad Dabeet

Artist Michal Rovner contructing one of her stone "Makom" structures

On Michal Rovner’s small farm in Ayalon Valley she keeps a pack of white dogs, each the size of a small furry sofa, and a donkey named Nof (meaning “Landscape”). “I always like to be close to the ground,” she says. “I always like to touch the earth, I like to smell it, I like to see people creating something that is very real, that has a very real dimension, when I wake up in the morning.” In her meadow stands a stone structure, like a temple, in the middle of the wide mantle of colorful blossoms.

“These are the ingredients that make me who I am.”

— Michal Rovner

Such monumental stone structures—collectively titled Makom (Place)—are at the center of Rovner’s thinking and her art. In the film Out in the World, we see the painstaking process of assembling one, block by weighty stone block, outside the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where Rovner’s work was showcased. The structures are fully cohesive—clean-lined, room-size boxes with perfect, mysterious apertures for peering in, or for entry or exit—yet the stones derive from a variety of dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian houses, from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, Nablus, Hebron, the Galilee, and elsewhere. The lifetime of the stones in her Makom pieces is greater than the singular grievances of any one person’s brief time here.

Often, Rovner inspects humanity as a scientist inspects a new virus under a microscope, or as an entomologist studies insects: as a teeming curiosity, as a single multi-minded organism. In much of her imagery, swarms of humanlike creatures, unidentifiable as individuals, march in file over landscapes and across screens, or crawl like ants over rocks.

The artist is clearly at home in her Ayalon farm/studio, which has a spartan magic: a single red poppy raises its head from a vase on a deep white windowsill; outside, the branches of an orange tree are weighted down with fruit. “This place is my element,” she says. “These are the ingredients that make me who I am.”

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

Michal Rovner: This place is my element

Sculptor Micha Ullman. Still from the film Out in the World. — Sculptor Micha Ullman. Still from the film *Out in the World.*

“I am interested in the level of our shoe soles—and below,” says sculptor Micha Ullman. He is speaking both metaphorically and literally. Some of his work has been dubbed “subterranean sculpture”—as with his 1995 Bibliothek (Library), located beneath Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the infamous site of Nazi book burnings in 1933. The work is an underground room filled with nothing but walls of empty shelves: a library without books, visible only by looking downward through a pavement-level window set into the cobblestone square. Visitors pause and consider, remember, mourn.

“What is full and what is empty, earth and air, matter and spirit . . . where does one thing end and another begin?”

— Micha Ullman

Sand—often the orange-red sand of the Sharon area north of Tel Aviv, where Ullman lives—has been a staple medium of his for many years; it provides, he says, a kind of language for him. At Sands of Time, Ullman’s 2011 retrospective at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum (for which we see him preparing in the film Out in the World), the floors were dotted with heavy minimalist iron structures coated with rust-colored sand.

Ullman’s works are as silent as history: viewers bring to them what interpretations they will. There is a deceptive simplicity to his sculptures, which contend with basic human relations or derive from everyday elements: a chair, a television, a book, a camera, a table. As in life, the meanings are never clear—except perhaps for the idea that there is duality in all things. “For me,” he says, “a pit is above all a question regarding the relationship between what is full and what is empty, earth and air, matter and spirit . . . where does one thing end and another begin?” The concave and convex are integrally connected, of course. “I look for good in evil,” says Ullman, “for the sky in a pit.”

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

Micha Ullman: Sculptures made of Iron and sand, as silent as history

Sigalit Landau works in a range of media and modes, from sinewy sculptures of elongated human figures to conceptual videos and films to massive installations. A former dancer, the artist is closely attuned to corporeality: she engages the idea of the body in nearly all her work. In one of Landau’s most striking videos, Dead See (2005), her own body becomes part of a dreamlike form floating in the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea: a spiral raft made of watermelons, threaded together like massive green-and-red beads, and her naked self.

“I like to be on the periphery…if I had to make a choice, I would choose to be here.”

— Sigalit Landau

Among the artist’s enduring and elemental fixations are water, sugar, meat, earth, and in particular salt. She has long planned to build a bridge of salt between Israel and Jordan, and for her 2016 project Salt Bride, she submerged a replica of a traditional Hasidic dress in the waters of the Dead Sea—no easy feat given the mineral-dense water’s buoyancy—the garment hovers there like a specter. “Salt heals, preserves, hides, kills,” Landau has said. And of the Dead Sea, which has provided her with such inspiration, she observes, “[It] has myths and (pre)history all around its shores, stories of radicalism, Christianity, heroics, unbelievable agriculture—and it is a border as well, so the behavior of salt and the natural environment is highly metaphoric, and keeps changing direction as I experiment.”

Israel is a very small country, and the number of major art venues is limited. “Many very good Israeli artists are living abroad,” says Landau. Why does she stay? “I like to be on the periphery, for various reasons. If I had to make a choice, I would choose to be here.”

It is perhaps inevitable that an Israeli artist will make work that engages society and politics, whether obliquely or directly. Artists have an advantage over politicians, as Landau eloquently observes: “Through politics you can show bottom lines. But bottom lines are never good. Through art, you can show much more complex things.”

These stills are from the film Out in the World, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.