Dress submerged in Dead Sea takes on dramatic transformation

Eight new images captured by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau over the course of a three month span show how the salinity of the Dead Sea slowly changing the color of a submerged dress from black to white, Mashable and other media outlets reported earlier this week.

Landau and her partner, photographer Yotam From, first placed the dress – which was a replica of the traditional Hasidic dress worn by the female character Leah in a 100-year-old Yiddish play known as The Dybbuk – in the waters of the Dead Sea back in 2014, according to CNET.

They duo captured a total of eight large color prints of the garment in a series dubbed Salt Bride, which is currently on display at the Marlborough Contemporary gallery in London, and over the span of 12 weeks, the salt water slowly caused the dress’s color to change from black to white.

In The Dybbuk, Leah is a bridge who is possessed by an evil spirit and ultimately exorcised of her demons, and as the gallery explained in a statement, her transformation is echoed by the Salt Bride series “as salt crystals gradually adhere to the fabric,” causing it to change “from a symbol associated with death and madness into the wedding dress it was always intended to be.”

So what caused the dress to change color while submerged?

Born in Jerusalem in 1969 and currently living and working in Tel Aviv, Landau has utilized the transformative effects of salt in her work on several previous occasions, even devoting one entire section of her website to showing various items (including a bicycle, a noose and a violin) which have been drastically altered by prolonged exposure to sodium chloride.

Each of those works was born out of her deep connection with the Dead Sea, according to Live Science. As Landau explained in a statement, “Over the years, I learnt more and more about this low and strange place… It is like meeting with a different time system, a different logic, another planet. It looks like snow, like sugar, like death’s embrace; solid tears, like a white surrender to fire and water combined.”

Making her vision come to life was not an easy task, however. As she explained to the website Artsy, “It was very hard to sink [the dress] and dive in the Dead Sea, where everything floats. The water is saturated with many materials apart from salt, and visibility is not easy to achieve.” She added that her colleague Yotam “needed special equipment and weights of 70 kg (154 lbs) on his body in order to go down.”

The project is an interesting melding of art and science. According to Live Science, the Dead Sea is among the saltiest bodies of water on the planet with a salinity of 34 percent (higher than even the open ocean, according to the website). It is this high salt content that causes it to be so dense, which is what enables people to float, and research suggests that the sea is only getting saltier.

“The hypersalinity is also what’s behind the alchemy that transforms the black dress into a shining white dress… As the dress initially caught bits of extra salt, that led to a locally higher concentration of salt, spurring the salt molecules to line up into crystals that eventually grew and transformed this deathly dress into a sparkly saline jewel,” Live Science senior writer Tia Ghose explained. The Salt Bride exhibition is scheduled to run through September 3.

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Image credit: MATANYA TAUSIG

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