Decoy #6 is an early example of Michal Rovner’s interest in both human migration and the crossing of artistic boundaries between abstraction and representation. Drawing from documentary footage, Rovner depicts a gradual, measured progression of multidirectional lines—human groups traversing a panoramic expanse of land, rendered in a murky, striated light.

Throughout a career of more than three decades, Rovner, one of Israel’s foremost contemporary artists, has employed a great variety of media (from photography, video, and digital art to painting and sculpture) to explore the theme of human struggle. In the Decoy series (1991) she adapts radar and surveillance imagery, altering it to produce photographs of indistinct groups of people, seen as small, dark silhouettes. These scenes of blurred figures in unidentifiable locations have no specific narrative. “I’m known as “the artist who has these little people walking,” she notes. “Sometimes they’re like bacteria in petri dishes, sometimes covering the whole wall. The people are faceless, universal. But they are always real people, it’s never animation—I always start with reality. In anything I do, in everything I do, I always start from something real.”

Without making any specific references, Rovner’s work produces an uncanny, discomforting effect. In a world where it is too easy to become inured to unsettling realities, her process speaks to the global, seemingly endless continuum of dislocation, migration, disruption, anxiety.