Sota installation documentation from Ofri Cnaani on Vimeo.
The Sota Project Trailer from Boaz Freund on Vimeo.
"Housed in an expansive, historic horse-stable above Galapagos Art Space, Ofri Cnaani’s ambitious piece invites viewers to step into room-sized moving panoramas, and walk through an enigmatic and disturbing ancient story that has hardly been told.
"Sota, an anonymous Biblical story, recounts the tale of two sisters, Sota and Bekhorah, who are bound together in symbiotic loyalty when Sota’s husband accuses her of infidelity. Against a backdrop of jealousy, betrayal, judgment, ritual humiliation, and ultimately death, Cnaani’s installation depicts a deceptively simple moral parable that unfolds in countless ways. Video projections on all four walls of the exhibition space will allow multiple narratives to develop concurrently, thus calling into question the notion of a single, coherent truth. The Sota Project uses the most current new media technologies while employing storytelling techniques inspired by ancient Greco-Roman murals and Renaissance tapestries.
"As James Trainor writes in the exhibition’s catalogue essay: 'In the case of Ofri Cnaani’s Sota Project, a complex multilayered video installation that unfolds in both time and three-dimensional space, the original kernel of a story is barely there. It is a haiku, an obscure scriptural footpath that peters out into nothing almost before it has begun, a barebones inventory of facts a mere fourteen lines long. The anonymous story from the Talmud – recounting the tale of two sisters, Sota and Bekhorah, living in separate villages but bound together in symbiotic loyalty amidst a backdrop of jealousy, betrayal,guilt and innocence, deception, societal judgment, ritual humiliation and ultimately death – is, as Cnaani points out, a deceptively simple moral parable, one that leaves open multiple blind spots.'"
Find the book here.