Sigalit Landau slowly lowers a pair of shoes from Israel through the ice in Gdansk

A pair of empty shoes automatically raises the question: where is the wearer? Sometimes you automatically think of them, as with the work shoes that Vincent van Gogh painted. They are so worn and worn that you automatically think of rough working hands and mud-spattered trousers, perhaps from the artist himself, or from someone else.

In the video Salted Lake two empty shoes that look suspiciously like Van Gogh’s shoes stand on the ice of a lake. At first glance they appear frozen, just like the water they stand on. Look, the same crystal-like substance. It isn’t until you watch the video for a while that you see the shoes slowly sink through the thick layer of ice, which would be strange if they were also frozen. Something else is going on here: the crystal layer around these shoes is not ice, but salt. Where is the wearer, and why did he or she leave these shoes here?

Between Worlds is the title of the exhibition by the Israeli artist Sigalit Landau in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. A well-chosen title, because Landau connects two worlds in her work: the one above water and the one under water. Her sculptures are created by immersing everyday objects, such as clothing, shoes or fishing nets, in the extremely salty water of the Dead Sea. This dipping does not happen for a moment, but sometimes for months. What appears radiantly white, fairytale-like and serene above water is in fact the result of an intensive work process. Landau gets up before dawn to install her artworks in the hot water of the Dead Sea. The molds are kept under water with the help of metal scaffolding and weights. The sea also does some of the work. The salty water envelops the objects in a thick, glittering crust.

The video Salted Lake is also an encounter between two worlds in a different way. Landau crystallized the shoes in Israel in the Dead Sea, then placed them on the ice in a lake in the Polish city of Gdańsk.

What do these completely different places have in common? The first thing that comes to mind is the Holocaust. Three million Polish Jews were murdered during World War II. A large proportion of the survivors emigrated to the new state of Israel after the war.

One of the things you will encounter when you visit the former Auschwitz concentration camp is a huge pile of worn shoes. Shoes are often the only material traces that remind us of the people who were murdered en masse in the camps. I remember seeing that mountain and feeling my throat tighten. The presence of that footwear made the absence of the wearers palpable.

Still there are those two salt shoes of Sigalit Landau, eating themselves through the ice. In the eleven minutes that the video lasts, an entire day has passed, from sunrise to now. The sun has now set, it is almost dark and then, very suddenly, the shoes disappear with a splash in the water. They leave behind only two black holes in the ice.