TEL AVIV.- Since the late 1990s Rona Yefman has created works based on years-long collaborations with people who challenge the mainstream. These collaborations yield layered representations – hovering between documentary and fiction, between personal life stories and socio-political narrative – that seek to express human complexities and expand the possibilities for individual freedom within a restrictive society.
Yefman’s new body of work, presented at
CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo, focuses on the figure of Netiva Ben Yehuda (1928-2011), a legendary Palmach commander in pre-State Palestine, and, in her later years, an author, radio host, and all-round cultural icon. Netiva’s direct and honest account of her experience during the war of 1948 from her personal, feminist viewpoint reveals cracks and subversions in the documentation of the national narrative and its founding myths. In the last 15 years of her life, Netiva hosted a weekly late-night radio program, “Netiva Speaks and Listens,” that reached cult-like status among her devout listeners.
Between 2006 and 2010 the artist documented behind the scenes of the radio program and Netiva herself, who allowed the artist to spend countless hours with her camera turned on. Through Rona’s subjective gaze, the singular figure of Netiva emerges, clad in her famous purple, as a non-conformist ‘elder of the tribe’; at once wry and charming, reclusive and fragile. The portrait of Netiva the radio lady is a multi-layered collage composed of photographs, texts, video and sound, that weaves direct documentation together with historical archives, and voices from a traumatic past together with radio chats “only about the good things.”
“Rona Yefman: Radio Netiva” is curated by Tamar Margalit. The exhibition is supported by Mifal HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts, the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation, and the Ostrovsky Family Fund (OFF). Additional support is provided by Bollag-Guggenheim AG, Nathalie Mamane-Cohen and Jean-Daniel Cohen, Sommer Contemporary Art, which represents Rona Yefman, and those who wish to remain anonymous. The artist was the recipient of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute 2015 Research Award.
