Rokni Elham

“Pointillism Orientalism” – On Elham Rokni’s Paintings

Elham Rokni’s paintings deal with the mediation of “Orientalist” images for the Western eye, including her own. Even though Rokni was born in Iran, since she immigrated to Israel when she was nine, the cultural baggage she was born with has been experienced from a distance in time and space, especially via the internet as the principle source of access to Iranian culture for Israelis.

In her research, Rokni followed the Islamic aesthetic, including mosque decorations characterized by patterns and colorfulness. Rokni imitates her background while simultaneously betraying it and painting it in a childlike manner. Her use of felt-tip pens and rolls of sticky tape display her refusal to create a perfect and complete image. One could say that her paintings examine the boundaries of representation – to what extent is it possible to destroy the “original” image while it still looking like the “real” thing – a tension that is at the center of the Western fantasy of the Orient.

Over the past few years, Rokni has produced a number of series of paintings including “Abbas”, “Backgammon,” and “Minnaret” thus creating an imaginary yet random order in the deluge of visual information. However, in this exhibition Rokni wrecks this order, spreading these images like the fan of a peacock proudly displaying its tail, but also a color scheme fan for home improvements.

Hila Cohen-Schneiderman

Prize Committee’s reasons

Elham Rokni’s paintings reveal a compressed and complex world of forms and subject matter.

Her works are characterized by experimentation in techniques and textures, which are often abruptly abandoned as if their job is done and they make way for the next experiment. These painterly moves gather strength for the experimentation itself and perhaps even more, from its abandonment. Thus a complex emotional sense of relentless construction and release is created by the observer. The sense of beauty is as dominant as the sense of discomfort. Rokni works in relatively small and intimate formats. Even when the painting is a family portrait, a landscape, or sketch for a ceiling, the treatment focusses on questions of material and textures, thus making it physical and personal. Architectonic images of arabesques and mosques appear on pages painted in black, green, and gold, like nostalgic childhood memories of distant places.

In her paintings, Rokni combines different painterly styles such as decorative and illusory, photographic and imaginary, abstract and figurative – proving that these disparate styles can harmoniously coexist on the same surface.

The Osnat Mozes Prize for a Young Artist is awarded to Elham Rokni for her fresh and unique painterly language that is free of hierarchies of high and low, religious and secular, public and private, charging her work with a contemporary imperative.

Prize committee members:  Sharon Poliakine, Efrat Galnoor, Gilad Efrat