Michal Rovner

Billed as a mid-career retrospective, the Michal Rovner show “the Space Between” at the Whitney Museum in New York collects over 70 photo and video works from the artist’s nearly two decade career and presents them in a powerful exhibit. The exhibit begins in 1991 with “Outside”, images of an abandoned Bedouin shack in the Israeli desert. An entire room is filled with images of this decrepit tin structure. Over and over the house is presented from this side and that; examined in color and in black and white; enlarged to the point where the detail nearly dissolves; the cumulative effect ( prints are sometimes ten or more to a wall) emphasizes the remoteness and singularity of the building till it seems we see it from all sides at once in the middle of nowhere. Still we are no closer to entering. It’s absolutely closed; an empty house on a flat plain in a dangerous land. This is a disconcerting work, a label which applies to most of these pieces. It is, however, the only time we see a dwelling in the exhibit; the total absence of humanity from these first images casts a shadow over the rest of the show, which utilizes (almost without exception) human figures cut off from structure and identifiable surroundings. The majority of her work is shot in the Balkans and the Middle East, troubled areas with a long history of violence and some of the worst examples of human behaviour. You would not guess this from the prints; as the release for the show points out, nothing in the images betrays their location, but this knowledge adds to the underlying tension, even when (and perhaps because) we cannot tell what the figures are doing. A series done of people swimming in the dead sea called “One Person Game Against Nature” (in a reference to game theory) is made up of a combination of posed and anonymous telephoto shots, shot from so far away they lose their environment and features entirely. Released from definite visual details the figures seem to float in the air, arms outstretched, like angels, or ghosts, or people falling from the sky.  Some are in black and white, some are in color, but all are enlarged nearly past the point of recognition. The color prints are rich in tone; the field upon which the figure rests partitioned in broad horizontal segments of dark orange and green, deep and warm, like Rothko’s canvases. The final section in the show is a mixture of prints and videos, all utilizing the same basic elements. Her characters, all in muddy silhouette, stand or move about aimlessly on the horizon above the black ground and below the white sky, stuck halfway between earth and heaven. There are echoes of The Seventh Seal here, and indeed there is a religious feeling to the entire show, culminating in these pieces, which feel purgatorial, a feeling intensified by an accompanying video installation projected floor to ceiling around the entire room, where twenty four levels of these figures, digitally multiplied, make their way wearily around the circumference. Is it a sad show? By no means. It is a show of great energy and beauty, but it is reminiscent of religious art in its air of grave and sometimes melancholy contemplation of our strange and chaotic species.