Michal Rovner’s work addresses themes of history, humanity and time. During the making of Encounter, the artist spent long nights in a desert, observing and being observed by jackals. The video records the jackals over a course of a few months using night-vision surveillance cameras. The resulting footage, slowly-edited and in soft-focus, appears more like a graphite drawing than a video work. It is only when the jackals cautiously move across the screen that this illusion is dispelled. With their glowing eyes, the jackals watch over, transforming the viewer into the observed. Their alert presence is protective rather than menacing - an encounter one wouldn’t expect in the dead of night.
MICHAL ROVNER (Israeli, 1957)
Mixed-media sculpture
108 x 190 x 13.7cm
Acquired in 2017
