Michal Rovner
"Michal Rovner" by Cameron Skene, Winter 2009, p. 130
The first work that you stumble upon in Michal Rovner’s exhibition at DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art dispels any doubt about the depth of the Israeli artist’s aesthetic. Hitlakdut (2006), a work shown at the 2007 Armory Show, is a boulder whose centre has been hollowed out to form a circular pit. An overhead projector beams a moving image into the pit; small figures, barely identifiable as human, converge and expand within the hollow.
Rovner makes digital recordings of groups of people whose movements— running, jumping and moving their arms—she has choreographed. In the final works, their images are crude but recognizable translucent elements; multiple projections overlap to create a swarm-like effect. The human experiment comes across as a bacterial mass, manipulated from above, doomed to dance within the confines of the work’s material context.
Hitlakdut—a Hebrew word meaning “cohesion”—illustrates the transformative touch that Rovner brings to her radically different materials. Combining the grim surface of stone with something as light as a video projection is a gesture toward the religious: earth and illumination merged into a living whole. The ethereal creatures dancing in their alternative universe slowly transform a hunk of rock into a vessel. Or have they simply dug themselves a pit?
Rovner’s work emulates the gaze of an ancient, indifferent deity. Occasionally a squirming stray mark seems lost, moving and stumbling in isolation, finding its way back to the choreographed swarm like a blind ant. The work provokes a strange but meagre empathy, which is amplified in a series displayed in petri dishes. Here, figures dance to the tune of scientific imagery: a floating bunch of chromosomes, a circular swarm of anthropomorphic marks seeking and dissolving order in their own domain, all set on cold steel tables.
The show also includes notebooks sealed in vitrines; projected beings twitch and hop on their surfaces. By far the most effective manifestations of Rovner’s technological language and theological intimations come in concert, however, with the presence of stone. Works like 2008’s Sela, subtly blending peripheral movement and the stone’s natural surface fissures, create a murmuring hieroglyphic dance that illuminates the imprint of spirit on material.
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