Michal Rovner – Transitions

Michal Rovner’s Transitions is a 16 meter long screen-based artwork addressing themes of humanity, history and time, commissioned by Canary Wharf Group and the City of London Corporation with the support of Pace Gallery.

Rovner began her work on Transitions by filming in London. She collected architectural elements, monuments and human figures, and created an imagined multi-layered space, a video collage of an iconographic London landscape.

In the lower part of this landscape, reminiscent of an underground public transportation map, is a complex network of lines in motion. Composed of small human silhouettes that resemble passing trains, the lines represent the swarming undercurrent of the metropolis. A few solitary figures further in the composition make their way from here to there, interacting with their environment. Random trains arrive and depart, linger and move on, like vectors moving constantly through the scene in different directions.

At the foreground of the work, two monumental sculptures overlook the scenery, as symbols of a city saturated with monuments. They stand as the markers of time for a bygone era, watching over the events, progress and developments of today.