At the Fondazione Merz, Michal Rovner's new site-specific project: protagonists are fear and checkers

From Monday, October 31, 2022 to Sunday, January 29, 2023, the Fondazione Merz presents the solo exhibition Alert by artist Michal Rovner (Israel, 1957). Curated by Beatrice Merz and conceived specifically for the exhibition space, the itinerary aims to return the public to animmersive experience rooted in the artist’s practice. Inserted in a multi-year research promoted by the artist and which sees art dialoguing with archaeology and politics, Alert evokes the themes and practices refined by Michal Rovner over the years, with particular attention to the technique of video mapping. Transforming the spaces of the Foundation, the exhibition project welcomes the public into a concealed and lightless space, similar to the waiting places where jackals, the real protagonists of the exhibition, are observed and studied, taking over the environment and inhabiting it by showing themselves as absolute guardians.

“Michal Rovner’s work asks questions, interrogates oneself, the visitor and the space, and welcomes works and people into a meta-space free of ornaments and for this reason absolute,” explains Beatrice Merz, president of the Merz Foundation and curator of the exhibition. “The vacillation of the symbolic system characterizing the identity of individuals enacts the ongoing narrative of human fragility. A common thread, an unraveling urgency leads Michal Rovner to bring out sensations, narratives or temporal signs, to bring to the surface, from under the skin, hidden or removed aspects, discrete but immanent presences.”

The exhibition aims to explore the state of alertness and sense of fear that arises fromencountering the other, that which is unfamiliar and therefore perceived as hostile. In order to fully restore this globally shared feeling, Michal Rovner identifies as particularly evocative the figure of the jackal, an animal traditionally associated with scenarios of destruction and disinclined to contact with human beings. Intense field research, which has seen the artist immerse himself in the jackal’s natural nocturnal habitat, has awakened a strong fascination with the sounds produced by the animal and its powerful iconographic legacy. Indeed, the jackal is closely linked to the mythological figure of the Egyptian god Anubis, destined to accompany the souls of the dead on their journey to life beyond death and to act as a divine intermediary between heaven and earth.

Sliding along the walls and taking possession of the space, Michal Rovner’s jackals construct a tense environment in which they take on the role of menacing observers, placing the visitor in the uncomfortable position of a foreign and unwelcome element. In a reversal of perspectives, the human being is revealed as much an intruder as the jackal is alien to him.

Rovner’s goal is to set up a reflection on the fears, threats and suspicions that arise from encountering the other, without excluding the possibility of a profound exchange with what we are accustomed to fear.

There is also no shortage of the documentary aspect: the artist invites us to dwell on the scale of themigratory experience that, according to UNHCR, has affected more than 100 million people this year, restoring the sense of an experience where the boundary between existence and disappearance is ephemeral and terribly fragile. In this sense, Michal Rovner’s work uses the power of images to unveil the real, the story hidden beyond history and here revealed at its most primitive and elemental core.

For info: www.fondazionemerz.org

Outdoor installation on view from Oct. 31 to Nov. 6.

Meeting with the artist and special visit to the outdoor installation: Nov. 4, 2022 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Image: Michal Rovner, Alert (2022). Courtesy of Fondazione Merz. Photo by Andrea Guermani

At the Fondazione Merz, Michal Rovner's new site-specific project: protagonists are fear and checkers

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