Michael Rovner

(Israel,1957)

Artist who works mainly in video, photography, sculpture and installation. His work is defined through the language of abstraction and addresses themes such as space, time and the human condition, moving between the poetic and the political to explore questions of nature, identity, dislocation and fragility of human existence. Rovner reinterprets historical memory and contemporary issues through his multimedia practice. By recording and erasing visual information, where the details of time and place are obscured, his works become gestural, layered and abstract reflections on the continuum of human experience. Rovner's works have been the subject of more than seventy individual exhibitions in some of the most important institutions in the world, such as the Tate Gallery, London (1997); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1999); the Israeli pavilion at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale (2007); and the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011). His work is part of the collections of the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA), New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Throughout his career, Rovner has received several awards, including the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, AICF (2007), the title of the Order of Arts and Letters awarded by the French Ministry of Culture (2010), and the EMT award in the Culture and Art category (2018). He has also received honorary degrees from Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2008), Ben-Guiron University in Beersheba (2015); and Tel-Aviv University (2016).

Presented at Medialab Madrid Culture Plate 5 and 7 (2003), the title is a play on words, since the English word culture is translated by culture, but also by cultivation. Inside two plates of glass Petricas - used in the laboratory to grow bacteria or fungi - or projected on the ground, small moving particles can be seen. A closer examination reveals that they are silhouettes of tiny human figures forming lines and advancing.
The viewer sees himself as a giant contemplating these tiny characters without identity who seem to move like automatons. But you can also feel like one of them, observed and trapped in a collective inertia that nullifies all reflection and individuality.