Art & Art History
Voices: Michal Rovner
Gallery 400 Lecture Room
400 South Peoria Street
Michal Rovner (born 1957) produces what Tate curator Frances Morris has called “fugitive images” to describe her grainy and elusive representations of representations. Rovner’s work explores the complexity of borders as a physical place as well as a social and political concept. In Decoy The Gulf War, she photographed video images of the Gulf War on television and enlarged them, making them both beautiful and remote. Dilemma is a series of forty-four flags hung above the Israeli-Lebanon border with abstracted images of crossed figures on both sides. The follow-up film, Border, was shot in 1996 and blends fact and fiction to examine the precariousness and danger that borders opposing forces.
Rovner is co-founder of Camera Obscura, a school for photography, film, and video in Tel Aviv. Her work is shown internationally, currently at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and recently at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. It is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tel Aviv Museum; Museum Jerusalem; and Biblioth que nationale de France. She studied cinema, television, and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and received a BFA in photography and art from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.