Elham Rokni

Lightning, 2011

The artist Elham Rokni, born in 1980 in Iran, immigrated to Israel with her family in the age of nine years and studied Fine Arts at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. For the first time Rokni’s series Spaces has been shown at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv in early 2012 in the exhibition Search Engine concerned with materials from the internet. With the series Spaces Rokni takes reference to her migrational background. The internet allows her, to overcome the distance towards the region of her childhood virtually. Starting by a google research on the Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami, an individual search process about images and forms emerges by various material ways. The drawings of mosque interiors follow this series, when Rokni came across images of Iranian ornaments. In the drawing Blue Space arches a rich ornamented Mihrab (sacred place in a mosque), which traditionally is separated by wooden barriers from the sanctuary of the caliph.