- Artist or Maker
- Elham Rokni
Iran, Tel Aviv, active Israel, born 1980 - Title
- Crossing the Dune
- Date Made
- 2010
- Medium
- Single-channel video
- Dimensions
- Duration: 5 minutes, 50 seconds
- Accession Number
- M.2015.186
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Contemporary
- Curatorial Notes
This sweetly absurd video records a young man attempting to cross a sand dune on a bicycle. The difficulty and preposterousness of his task become apparent as he rides along a set of boards that pave his path for a short distance. Then he must stop to move the boards, creating another brief stretch of passable ground, only to begin again. His laborious journey—of unknown purpose and destination—is simultaneously frustrating and humorous, bringing to mind both Sisyphus and Buster Keaton and serving perhaps as a universal metaphor for any seemingly insurmountable undertaking. For the creator of the video, Elham Rokni, it has a more personal meaning pertaining to her own physical challenges.
Born in Iran in 1980, Rokni immigrated to Israel in 1989. She received her bachelor of fine arts and master of fine arts from Bezalel Academy, Tel Aviv, and her work has been the subject of numerous group and solo exhibitions in Israel, the United States, and Europe. Much of Rokni’s video work directly addresses her own complex identity, and some projects have used surveillance-style filming to capture staged, purposely ambiguous events that are both unsettling and amusing.
