Johan Pijnappel: War scenes have been an important subject in painting for centuries, and attracted large audiences in the travelling Panoramas at the end of the 19th century. In spite of the lesser attention for war in the 'story of modern art' in the 20th century, it has a permanent place in your work. What do art and war have in common for you?
Michal Rovner: In the end, destruction and creation are on the same parallel. They are only on opposite ends.
JP: The history of the young state of Israel is completely overshadowed by war. You were born in Tel Aviv in 1957, and even as a woman you had to serve in the army for two years. How did this influence your outlook on life?
MR: Actually, my mother told me there was a war going on when she was pregnant with me. It must have made an impression on me, because it is a very extreme situation, such strong emotions, but other things have made impressions as well. I don't really think my work is about war.
JP: Family plays a very important role in life in Israel. In 1988 you went to New York, a place with so much competition in the art world. How do you look now at this displacement of yourself, at being out of context?
MR: Which context? One can be in the same place and yet be out of context, or be far away and still be in context. There are many contexts going on simultaneously.
JP: In 1991 you followed the war on CNN. On one hand you were very scared about the situation in your home land Israel. On the other hand you were fascinated by how beautiful and remote it looked . You took Polaroids of the tv images. How did you experience the gap between what you knew and what you saw?
MR: It was a shifting experience between realities in a strange time overlap.
JP: As a filmmaker, videographer and photographer you use techniques from computer technology, video, photography, printmaking, and painting to address issues of human condition. Your large photographs look like paintings. In what way do the new media change our perception? What is the ability of film or video to capture an elusive reality?
MR: Fortunately and unfortunately camera/video cannot capture reality, even though reality definitely has an effect on the recorded material.
JP: This year the World Wide Video Festival has asked you to make a new work for the New Wing of the Stedelijk Museum. On the first video sketches for this installation there are birds again, besides other images. In earlier works such as 'Border' and 'Mutual Interest', both shown at the 15th World Wide Video Festival, you use birds in different ways to express fear and detachment. On the festival more than 25 countries are represented. These works reflect different cultures and ways of thinking. How in your work do you deal with the various interpretations of birds which exits in different cultures?
MR: It is not my intention to address various interpretations of different cultures. There is something else I am looking for behind that shifting force and something else I find behind there which is more ambiguous.
JP: In a commission in the East Part of Berlin Christian Boltanski expressed his artwork by literally putting nameplates on the different floor levels of the remaining Wall, of the people who lived over there at the time Berlin was bombed at the end of World War II. In your proposal for the installation for the Stedelijk Museum you say about the visuals that they are very non-specific, non-literal, it could be anywhere. On the other hand, for example in the sound, you relate very strongly to the physical location, in this case the ground floor of the Sandberg wing of the Stedelijk Museum. In how far do you consider this installation and your art to be site specific?
MR: There is always a dialogue between your work and the place, even if you ignore it. I create this work with special considerations to the architectural structure, to the fact that it happens at night, and in Amsterdam.
JP: The World Wide Video Festival experiments with how new media can be used in a different context than the museum. Its former office in The Hague functioned as an office with video sculptures during daytime, while at night the video projections could be seen by the theatre going public. How do you want to work with this new installation on the "border" between the museum and the street?
MR: It is a challenge to display my space in your space. My space in which something might happen any moment in your unthreatening non-threatened city, to confront two such different emotional seismographs.
- Johan Pijnappel
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Sound: Rea Mochiach, Editing: Dan Itzhaki, Avi Bello, Quentin Olszenski, Vico Shaarabani, Architectural advice: Effi Wizen, Support: Lotan Comunications, Yoram Altman, Gravity Post Production
Michal Rovner ° 1957, Tel Aviv (Israel)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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