Frontispiece: CULTURE-C1

Michal Rovner (Israeli, b.1957)

Data Zone, exhibited in 2003 at the Venice Biennale of Art, is a series of culture plates (Petri dishes) in which tiny human figures are moving in different patterns of order and disorder. The work offers the visitor the viewpoint of a scientist observing the object of their research, magnifying its smallest details, while at the same time, offering a distant, “objective,” cold, scientific look at a group of humans, the human species.
The culture plates are becoming newly relevant these days. We are all critically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, experiencing instability and uncertainty, following the data, charts and graphs. We are all researching and being researched. The work from 2003 generated various questions, and among them one that recurred again and again: Who are these people? Is it us or is it them?
How will we live together? Some of the strongest images of these current pandemic days are of the empty public spaces. This imagery evokes existential anxiety and an implicit threat to social structures, a dread which provokes in us the need to re-think contemporary social cultural structures.