The Seven Abdulkarims
2018 / HD Stereo 22 minutes video
The Seven Abdulkarims
2018, CCA Tel Aviv, Curator Sergio Edelstein
The Seven Abdulkarims project includes a video, a folktale book, and drawings. The video merges fiction and reality, blending North African oral history with Roknis’ own memories of and reactions to these foreign tales.
Told by Omar Issa, a Sudanese asylum-seeker, the The Seven Abdulkarims tale recounts the attempt of seven men, each named Abdulkarim, to reach Libya from their home in Sudan. Having never left their small village and with no concept of the struggles ahead, they all die before making it to their destination, in ways equally comical and horrific. Composed of nine distinct scenes in contrasting genres and styles, Rokni uses the narrative structure to blend metaphor and satire on Israel’s current immigration situation. It is at once playful, surreal, and deadly urgent.
The Sultan, the Girl, the Iblis and the Lion’s Tail
2018, 21 X 15 cm, 232 pg, Hebrew, English, Arabic, Tigirinya.
Installation view at CCA Tel-Aviv, 2018
The Verdict of the Vixen
2017, 37x55 cm
A Tuft of Hair from a Lion’s Tail
2018, 48x61 cm
The Sultan Faruk
2017, 176x87 cm
Better to Be Eaten by Your Own Village’s Hyena!
2017, 60x47 cm
Iblis I
2017, 30x21 cm
The Vixen and the Hyena
2017, 60x47 cm
Between 2015 and 2016, Rokni collected folktales from Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, currently the two largest asylum-seeking communities in Israel. They were heard and recorded in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, and the Holot detention center, located deep in the Israeli desert.
This book is a collection of eighteen folktales alongside drawings which Rokni created responsively. The eighteen folktales have been registered in The Israel Folktales Archive (IFA), established in 1955, with the goal of documenting and studying various mythologies and narratives passed down amongst newly arrived immigrants.