Gil Yefman | Strange Wreath

In his works, Gil Yefman explores issues surrounding gender, memory, and body, using soft materials and techniques identified with traditional crafts. One of these is hand knitting, which for him is not only a material action, but also a physical-social gesture. “I see knitting as writing, the thread of wool is like the thread of thought. The tactility and colors of the soft and touchable knits create exceptional enticement that reveals difficult subject matters, and the use of wool imbues these themes with another, even intergenerational, dimension.”1
The installation “Strange Wreath” was created in collaboration with knitters in a series of knitting sessions that the artist initiated together with community centers in south and east Tel Aviv: Kiryat Shalom, Nahalat Yitzhak, Florentin, HaTikva Quarter, and the City Museum itself. The knitted floral elements were joined to create a wreath suspended from the ceiling, unfolding above the viewer’s heads in the exhibition space. Reminiscent of the flower wreaths used at funerals and national memorial services, here it is the fruit of the effort of random collaborators, who created it together in soft material and long hours of common handiwork. Inspired by Isaiah’s End Times prophesy, Yefman proposes to mobilize what he calls “a brigade of conscientious knitters” for a communal artistic action – “and they shall beat their swords into yarn, and their spears into knitting needles.”
The repeated gestures of connecting and unraveling create a poetic-political space, where the personal and the public are intertwined, the private action is assimilated into an expansive tapestry, and the human connections created in the knitting sessions become a part of the final outcome, even if they are not visible to the viewer. With that, Yefman undermines the official national gesture and proposes an alternative communal ritual in its place: a space of shared creation, a “compassion war room,” as he dubbed it. There, as the final artistic object takes shape, a living tapestry of human connection is woven alongside it – reimagining possible memory, repair, and shared life in the city.

*1 Dana Gillerman, “How to Diffuse Explosives with Bombs”, Calcalist, 2017 (in Hebrew).