Celebrating Israel's 70th Anniversary: Michal Rovner and Tal Shochat

With Panorama, Rovner evokes themes of human interaction, dislocation and the persistence of history, while creating a new level of immediacy by further removing the narrative to its barest and most urgent elements. Rovner creates her videos by first filming actors who enact sequenced movements. Little by little through the editorial process, she removes all traces of individual identity so that all that remains is a broad focus on humanity’s entirety.

Gardens and trees are a recurring theme in Shochat’s work, alluding to the Garden of Eden as well as to Tu BiShvat or “New Year of the Trees,” a holiday on the Jewish calendar which is also celebrated among secular Israelis as a day of ecological awareness. Whereas Rovner’s work emphasizes abstraction and universality, Shochat’s work has a well-honed specificity that connects it to a specific place: the Golan Heights in Israel, near the border with Lebanon and Syria. In a region best known for its contested history, the artist turned her focus toward the remarkably resilient fruit trees that grow on land that farmers have cultivated in roughly the same manner over the course of 400 years. Selecting trees that change their appearances over time—pomegranate, plum, apple, and persimmon—Shochat created triptychs recording each tree in three stages of growth: the fruit set stage, the exfoliation stage, and the bloom stage. Regarding her location scouting in the Golan Heights, the artist observed, “The war in Syria and its consequent movement of refugees close to the border colored my searches throughout this beautiful but dangerous rural environment, with an apocalyptic feeling.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website