Night

Michal Rovner
Pace Gallery, NYC
Sep 16 – Oct 22

Michal Rovner’s newest exhibition, “Night”, immerses the viewer into the mystery, the anxiety, and the other-worldliness of darkness. An immediate encounter with Rovner’s ginormous installations of jackals surrounding the farm she lives on in Israel disorients the viewer and surrounds them with an anxiety that is hard to comprehend at first. As the audience moves deeper into Rovner’s world of night vision jackals, the godly glow of their eyes catches from over one’s shoulder in every direction, suspending a viewer in the palm of the “other”, where we are no longer in control.

This question of one’s relation to the “other” is a repeated topic for Rovner, but in this work, the relationship channels more prehistoric instincts. These jackals learn to genetically hide from humans, while we have also adapted to fear the unknown in darkness. This correlation between surveillance and suspicion finds itself a life within the tangible discomfort in the jackal’s gestures and their slight, disjointed movements. Rovner’s work in “Night” thrives by creating an environment that captures a double-sided dance with fear and power. The jackals live as mystical creatures, as dangerous threats, and as rulers of a post-apocalyptic environment- all simultaneously. In the same vein, these animalistic gestures reveal an uneasiness to the human viewer that reminds them of the thousands of years of industrialization and domestication animals have witnessed, which naturally blurs the line between who is the more powerful of the two parties.


Our relation to the “other”, as is so often true in our own contemporary society, is constantly suspended in flux between shared experience and an abundance of apprehension and distrust. “Night” creates an encapsulating space to view the dynamics of these shifts- be it a shift into night and darkness, a shift in our power as humans in relation to nature, or perhaps even a shift in our physical world, leaning closer to something post apocalyptic and beyond our current experience.
by Amy Fink