The Blind Scenario

from: THE BLIND SCENARIO- A Predator’s Strategy and article by Claudia Zanfi:

A small drawing, a found photograph, topographical maps.
Ofri Cnaani’s work ranges from video creations to images registered on architects’ paper. Drawings that privilege movements of accumulation and the slow saturation of black ink, constant regulation and unexpected slashes. If it is true that the present is a slow narrative development, then the predominant manner for the image to proceed is cyclical. Certain points constantly return: for example life / death / prey / predator / victim / tormentor. From the Abu Ghraib affair to the overturning of man/woman roles. In the cycle The Blind Scenario the images of hooded figures, or of small bombs (almost a sort of living room objets d’art), lead to a rereading of the object: we can see once again all the deviances of society and contemporary issues. These macro-sequences develop no further: they repeat, contrasting and substituting the flow of history. Recurrent segments constitute a sort of “refrain” that is never calming or reassuring. The group of drawings like Camouflage and The Colonel and I present situations that oscillate between irony and violence, expressing an explicit or contained sense of aggressiveness that always remains, as the artist herself has said, a “state of emergency”. Social and political phenomena pressure the Middle East with particular urgency, and the artist gives voice to the pressures that surround her. It is recent history: territorial conflict, arbitrary geographical demarcations, wars, exiles, occupation. But beyond the images there lies a strong act of denouncement, criticism of a sick society, of war, of bourgeoisie, of a smothering of the weakest. Cnaani’s drawings reveal the decisive mark of a woman who narrates her historical and political position as an artist. Through her artwork, Cnaani expresses a concept of resistance, of political and cultural action, of reclaiming the right to liberty in places in which these concepts are all too often left behind and forgotten.