Gil Yefman: Kibbutz Buchenwald

Gil Yefman’s solo exhibition presents a new project that develops his collaborations of recent years with the artist Dov Or-Ner and the Kuchinate collective. The exhibition revisits a short historical event from the end of World War II and the early years following the establishment of the country. It considers the rift that opened between “Holocaust” and “revival,” evokes collective traumas and offers ways of unison. Through the motif of cultivated nature emerges an imagined, fantastic, queer and mystic site – that is, kibbutz Buchenwald.

   Gil Yefman and Dov Or-Ner, from the video Kibbutz Buchenwald, 2018 

The video installation Bad Renro and Penelope at Kibbutz Buchenwald stands at the center of the exhibition. The film follows two characters: Penelope embodied by Gil Yefman, and Bad Renro embodied by Dov Or-Ner. The work’s title relates to a short historical event in which a group of survivors from Buchenwald concentration camp sought to implement a communal ideology and realize a productive and collective future from within the anarchy that was the end of World War II. The survivors chose a name that indicated the place they met and formed as a group – kibbutz Buchenwald. Yet when they arrived in the country to carry out their shared vision, the kibbutz movement had difficulty accepting such an anomalous phrase. The name evolved and survived for four years before its current name was decided – kibbutz Netzer Sereni. The original name, loaded with a rare possibility of remembrance, slipped away from the historical canon.

Despite its ties to the past, Bad Renro and Penelope’s kibbutz Buchenwald is a contemporary, not historical, site. The video is shot in the places as they are today: kibbutz Netzer Sereni with its lawns and paths, the historical buildings that are used as venues for conferences and events, and the Holocaust memorial monument made by the Zionist sculptor Batya Lishanski. So too Buchenwald concentration camp, which today functions as an active memorial site, with opening hours and a website, a visitor center offering guided tours, youth hostel, museum, shop and café. Zionism and Holocaust remain explosive subjects of fervent preoccupation that still shapes local identity, defines morals and tradition, ranges between delicate familial feelings and the politics of public sentiment.

      Gil Yefman, Condensed Milk Cans, 2018. Diptych, acrylic on canvas

The exhibition narratives intertwine through the motif of cultivated nature. Thus, the installation Hedgerow, based on a 1943 letter in which the commandant of Auschwitz extermination camp ordered the director of the SS agricultural branch to obtain bushes, shrubs and trees that would serve as natural camouflage to hide the crematoriums. The installation simulates a live wall that acts as an architectural screen in the exhibition space. The piece was made by Yefman and the women of Kuchinate collective who held public knitting circles at Tel Aviv museum of Art. 265 volunteers who answered an open call took part in crocheting woolen leaves into a knitted hedgerow. The mute nature allows Yefman to transform the building blocks of Israeli society, to pick at the wounds of memory, to gaze at them with eyes wide open and to plant new seeds in them.

              Gil Yefman and Kuchinate Collective, Hedgerow, 2008
   Knitted installation (wool, Acrilan, felt, wire, embroidery thread, gas pipes)

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport foundation, the Ostrovsky Family fund, the Lauren and Mitchell Presser fund, and the Malka fund, New York.

About the artists

Gil Yefman, recipient of the 2017 Rappaport Prize for a Young Israeli Artist:

Born 1979, kibbutz Ramat Yohanan. Yefman first entered the Israeli art world in the late 1990s in a joint project with his sister, the artist Rona Yefman, who documented his sex change in a series of photographs. His engagement with sexuality, otherness and complex identities later moved from the private body to the creation of soft sculpture installations and objects. During the first decade of his artistic activity Yefman created brightly colored knitted sculptures of grotesque, fluid multi-organ bodies in an original and unique sculptural language. Choosing to work in knitting and sewing, techniques associated with female, domestic and decorative crafts, disclosed his stance regarding fringe traditions and cultures. The soft objects were often read as a defense mechanism protecting the vulnerable, threatened body.

Dov Or-Ner:

Born 1927, Paris, among the pioneers of conceptual art in Israel, lives and works in kibbutz Hatzor Ashdod. A highly productive and influential artist who is also known to collaborate on many artistic projects. Or-Ner established The Museum of Museums, a non-physical museum body, a one-person establishment which contains all his artistic acts and undermines mainstream institutional hegemony. His continuous conceptual work since the end of the 1960s and to this day includes acts of burying, experimentations in estimates of time and distance, post-art and ecological art. Or-Ner’s artistic work underwent a dramatic turning point a decade ago that is linked to a childhood memory and spawned, through a reversal of his name, the character Bad Renro. This was the first time Or-Ner explicitly addressed the fact of his being a Holocaust survivor. Since then his work has not ceased its preoccupation with the war that shaped his childhood, and himself as a man. "I want to be the first ecological terrorist and the last Holocaust survivor,” he says.

             Dov Or-Ner, “Crematoriums Hotel (Palace-Pallax)”, 2018
                      Ink jet print on paper (series of 24 prints)

Kuchinate Collective:

Kuchinate (crochet in Tigrinya) is a collective of African asylum-seeking women living in Tel Aviv. The collective was formed by Diddy Mymin Kahn, a clinical psychologist, who studied the impact of rape and sexual abuse on Eritrean asylum-seeking women. She was joined by Azezet Kidane, an Eritrean nun and trained nurse, who was honored by the US Department of State in 2012 as a “hero of our time acting to end modern slavery.” Sister Aziza (as she is known) obtained 1,500 testimonies of victims of torture camps in Sinai, and in so made a significant contribution to exposing the phenomenon and raising awareness to the subject in Israel and elsewhere. Membership in the collective allows women to earn a livelihood and to deal with the uncertainty of their status through craftwork originating in African culture. Their first collaboration with Yefman was presented in the exhibition Dangerous Art at Haifa Museum of Art in 2017 (curated by Svetlana Reingold) and in Violated! Women in Holocaust and Genocide at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York (curated by Batya Brutin).

Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Dates: 26 December 2018 – 10 May 2019
Agnes and Beny Steinmetz Wing for Architecture and Design, Herta and Paul Amir Building 
Curator: Adi Dahan
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue