MAY 18-29: 'MAKING OF MAKOM' AT L'ESPACE CULTUREL BY LOUIS VUITTON, PARIS

To coincide with Michal Rovners contemporary art exhibition ‘Histoires’ at the Louvre in Paris, the Louis Vuitton L’Espace Culturel will offer a behind the scenes view of the creation of Rovner’s Makom series.

Text by Lucy Mclean

The two monumental stone structures entitled ‘Makom II’ and ‘Makom IV’ (meaning ‘space’ in Hebrew) were built in the Cour Napoleon of the Louvre Museum by the Israeli multimedia artist, Michal Rovner and her team of Palestinian and Israeli stone masons. The simple square structures consist of a complex puzzle of original and uncut stones from destroyed Israeli and Palestinian houses. The stones for Makom II, which weighs in at around 40 tons, were taken from Jerusalem, Galilee, Hebron and Bethlehem, among other cities, and the structure features a narrow vertical opening which allows visitors a unique view inside. The larger Makom IV, weighing an estimated 70 tons, was assembled with dark stones from the border of Israel and Syria and features a striking diagonal fissure that nearly cuts the entire wall in half.

“One can sense the life – memories that settled among them, the echoes of the struggles that surrounded them – the clash of tribes, of nations, of religions and armies that fought one another over land or power or honour, over freedom, over home. More than anything, they evoke the fragile human individual, crushed between these forces.” David Grossman, Israeli author.

The ‘Making of Makom‘ exhibition, running from 18-29 May 2011,  will feature a selection of photography and film installations revealing the many dimensions, both sculptural and human, of this impressive project. The exhibition will also include a preliminary sketch for the book ‘Dans tes bras’ (The Hug) created by Michal Rovner and David Grossman, and a special discussion with these two brilliant minds will take place in L’Espace Culturel on May 26^th at 7pm.

www.louisvuitton.com/espaceculturel

Michal Rovner’s ‘Histoires‘ exhibition, running from 19th May – 15th August 2011 at the Louvre, includes two further site-specific installations within the Museum, consisting of giant projections on the original foundations of both the Medieval Louvre and the Levant (Department of Near Eastern Antiquities). In this way, Rovner creates a sort of futurist restoration of the Louvre while the Makom series structures play with themes of construction and destruction through their ability to be deconstructed and reconstructed anywhere in the world thanks to a classic archaelogical technique of numbering each stone individually. Developed from her lifelong experiences with tension and conflict in the Middle East, the recreation of Rovner’s Histoires exhibition within the Louvre generates a larger dialogue with History and still maintains a special resonance within this universal institution…

“It’s a great challenge to communicate with the Louvre, which contains all those places and times and fragments of human culture, from my point in time and place.” Michal Rovner.

www.louvre.fr

All images courtesy Michal Rovner