Michal Rovner, Esther Scroll — The Kingdom, on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Michal Rovner: Esther Scrolls

Now showing6 August 2026 – 18 January 2027$25

In the Fenway Gallery, Israeli video and installation artist Michal Rovner responds to the Book of Esther with her own scroll works, shown alongside the Museum's Rembrandt-era Esther exhibition.

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On now All of October 2026

Queen Esther walks through a Persian palace as two figures, one dark and one light, and then walks through it again. Michal Rovner shot it on video with the look of a worn fresco or textile. Laura Hodes, who writes about Jewish art, said it seems "as if about to disintegrate".

Rovner studied handwritten megillahs, the parchment Esther scrolls read at Purim, and made three new works in their shape. Beside the video hangs a print over eight feet tall, with the Hebrew for "Esther" at the top and "fear fell upon them" just below. The third is ten small prints on old handmade Chinese paper, laid end to end like a scroll, their blotches somewhere between letters and people.

You find it in a small room on the first floor, just past the courtyard. With only three works, pair it with The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt upstairs. Both are in the $25 museum ticket, free on Thursdays from 5 to 9pm.

Look for

Esther Scroll: The Kingdom
Look for Esther split into a dark and a light figure, crossing the palace again and again while other women appear and vanish around her like text on a page.
Esther Scroll: New Reflections
A vertical print over eight feet tall, topped by the Hebrew word for Esther, with the fragment "fear fell upon them" directly underneath.
Esther Scroll: New Realizations
Ten small prints on very old handmade Chinese paper, laid out like a horizontal scroll and made to look like rubbings taken from biblical-era stones.