Born in 1955 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Michal Rovner uses photography, installation, video projection, and drawing to probe ideas of collective identity and belonging. Having served in her country's army and studied cinema, philosophy, and art in Tel Aviv, Rovner moved to New York in 1988 and now divides her time between the city and her farm in Israel. … (read more)

Born in 1955 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Michal Rovner uses photography, installation, video projection, and drawing to probe ideas of collective identity and belonging. Having served in her country's army and studied cinema, philosophy, and art in Tel Aviv, Rovner moved to New York in 1988 and now divides her time between the city and her farm in Israel.

Rovner's early work emphatically dealt with notions of borders, both national and cultural. Her 1990 photographic series The Outside, for instance, was based on an abandoned Bedouin house in the Israeli desert which she treated as a shadowy specter of itself, stripped of any features that might recall a sense of identity or communal history--as if the home, like a tightly guarded border, was a threshold not to be crossed but to be experienced through imagination and memory, a place which suspended in time and space.

Later she expanded on the idea of collective beliefs as spaces for philosophical speculation by applying the concept to other classifications of knowledge or reality, such as science, archeology, and history. In her Culture Tables series (2007), she presented large Petri dishes containing looping video images of enigmatic human figures resembling micro-organism, merging and splitting endlessly. The piece triggers reflections on human migration, group coercion, and the inevitable lack of rationality in human behavior.

Rovner represented Israel at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and her work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Jeu de Paume. She is also the co-founder of Tel Aviv’s Camera Obscura Art School, a hybrid studies center for photography, film, and computer-based art.

Click here to read an interview with Rovner on the BBC

Watch a video of Rovner's work at the 2008 Armory Show:

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