Unearthing the Unseen - Musings of a Metaphysical Archeologist

In 2006, Michal Rovner began a series of largescale works titled Makom (Place). Rovner has collected building stones form the remains of old Israeli and Palestinian houses from places like Jerusalem, Galilee, Haifa, Nablus, and Hebron. These new works are simple nearly cubic, structures assembled from these stones. in the first work of the series, Makom, the four walls are pierced by small openings, creating space which the viewer can never enter and can only partially see. In Makom II, exhibited at PaceWildenstein, one of the structure s four walls has a vertical gap from top to bottom. The gap is tall and wide enough to look through, too thin to enter. The traditional building techniques employed by Rovner and her of Isreali and Palestinian masons require no mortar, but rather the nearly perfect fitting of the rows of stones. However, the use of stones from dozens of long demolished houses, combined with the artist s insistence that the stones never be recut, leads to an archeological search through countless dusty piles for the perfect piece to fit an increasingly complex puzzle that the artist devises as she goes along. Finally, using a classical archeological technique, Rovner numbers each stone enabling the work to be disassembled and reassembled anywhere in the world. Proceeding across the rows of stone, the numbers tie the stones permanently to their new formation, while simultaneously asserting their individual biographies.