"In “Oriental Landscapes,” Cnaani offers a representation of the Middle East as both romantic and catastrophic place. In this series Cnaani juxtaposes vintage posters made by Jewish agencies during the 1920s for advertising the return to the homeland of Israel (then Palestine) with current images of Palestinian ‘landscapes’. Slogans such as ‘Land for Youth’, which are imbued with new visual connotations in today’s realty of occupation, ironically appear very similar in both sides’ nationalistic terminology..In her new landscapes, Cnaani marries romantic Western symbols of the East, such as camels, palm trees, and grape vines, with cataclysmic images of today’s political reality. By situating figures of enthusiastic foreigners–who appear in various stages of blindness–within these outlandish landscapes, Cnaani suggests that the catastrophe, writ-large, serves a new form of ‘romanticism’ by limiting the ability of the Western eye to see anything but, or to understand the East in meaningful local terms detached from a global conflict."