Michal Rovner: Untitled/Night, 2016

With glowing eyes, a jackal peers from the Façade of the Gardner Museum, where it stands sentinel. For months, world-renowned video artist Michal Rovner listened to the nightly howls of these nocturnal creatures in the hills around her home. Their presence frightened her, but she ventured into the dark again and again, hoping to capture them with a night-vision camera. One evening, a jackal emerged from the bushes and looked directly at her.

In meeting its eyes, Rovner felt she was looking at something more than an animal, rather an unearthly force—ancient and knowing, strange yet familiar. She was reminded of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of Egyptian mythology, protector of souls traveling to the afterlife.
 

The video-still print of the guardian-like creature on the Gardner’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade represents one iteration of Israeli American artist Michal Rovner’s series Night, which depicts the jackals that dwell on the liminal spaces near her farm. Across the image, tiny figures seem to move under and through the jackal’s watchful gaze, protected in their ethereal journey. Through these animals, Rovner asks us to turn our own eyes to the timeless human universality of belonging and otherness, fear and perseverance.
 

Over the past 30 years, Michal Rovner has developed an expansive multimedia practice that embraces video, projection, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Her poetic, often meditative works explore universal questions of nature, identity, collective memory, and the fragility of human existence. By recording and obscuring the visual information that locates time and place, Rovner blurs the lines between past and present, creating gestural, layered, and abstract works that reflect on the continuum of human experience.

Recognized among today’s most important video artists, Rovner has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002) and a three-part exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011). Among her site-specific public art commissions are projects for the Municipio Metro Station, Naples; Canary Wharf Crossrail Underground Station, London; Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem; and the atrium of the Shinsegae Heritage Chanel flagship store, Seoul. Rovner’s work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the British Museum, London; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.

Rovner studied cinema, television, and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She lives and works between New York City and a farm in Kfar Shmuel, Israel.