Michal Rovner: Esther Scrolls

The 2,500-year-old story of Esther unfurls across handwritten Hebrew scrolls, called megillahs, which are unrolled as they are read. Michal Rovner researched historic megillahs and created two contemporary vertical scrolls in response to the Esther story. Through both video projection and print, the Israeli American multimedia artist reinterpreted a tradition centuries old, meditating on Esther’s bravery and what her story reveals about the human condition across time.

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.