Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner, born in Israel in 1957, works with video, sculpture, and installation exploring issues of time, place, and identity, reflecting on the continuum of human existence in an innovative artistic language.

Rovner’s multimedia practice received a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002. The presentation featured her multichannel work Time Left (2002), depicting thousands of ambiguous silhouetted figures walking en masse in multiple rows. At the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Rovner represented Israel with the memorable acclaimed exhibition Against Order? Against Disorder?, where she displayed petri dishes with tiny human figures.

The artist’s 2011 three-part exhibition Histoires at the Louvre presented stone and video works inside the museum and installed two of her monumental stone sculptures, Makom II and Makom IV, in the Cour Napoléon, adjacent to I. M. Pei’s iconic pyramid. With stones collected from dismantled or destroyed houses, these massive structures weighed fifty to seventy tons each, and their primordial forms created a dialogue with the ornate classical façades of the Louvre.

The site-specific Transitions was installed at Crossrail Place in London in 2019. In this 16-meter-long video work, the abstracted image of human flow is represented as an undercurrent in an iconographic landscape of London, evoking time, history, and the constant transition of human existence.

The 2019 video work Crepe nel muro, Palermo (Cracked Wall, Palermo), addresses moments of cracks and breaks in the human timeline. Thousands of figures are seen marching between elongated cypress trees in a 25-meter-tall projection, woven into the walls of the church of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, Italy.

Rovner’s explorations shift constantly between the poetic and the political and between the present and invocations of the past. She has been commissioned to create numerous public artworks over the course of her career, and her work is included in the collections of museums worldwide.