Online Special: Rona Yefman
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Sommer Contemporary Art is pleased to present an online exhibition of works by Rona Yefman. The artist (b. 1972, Haifa, Israel), lives and works in New York, USA and in Kiryat Tiv’on. She explores identity through photographing, videotaping, collecting texts, and collaborating with individuals who have formed radical personas and life stories that challenge the conventions between reality and fiction.

Rona Yefman has had solo exhibitions in numerous venues, including Participant inc. NY (2010), Sculpture Center NY (2011), Oslo Kunstforening (2019) and Haifa Museum of Art (2020). A solo exhibition of her work is scheduled to open at the CCA Tel Aviv in the following year.

For further information about the exhibition, please contact us at info@somergallery.com.

The online exhibition includes three bodies of work by Rona Yefman. The first series of works presented, “Let It Bleed,” includes photographs and performative videos that were taken between 1995-2010 with her younger brother Gil and chronicle the two siblings’ symbiotic existence as collaborative artists during Gil’s Journey of gender transformation, and their mutual desire to live exterior to the norm. The Artist Book “Let it Bleed” was published in 2016, as a limited edition of 500 copies, by Little Big Man books, L.A.

“The Strongest Girl in the World” (2006-ongoing) is based on a collaboration with the Danish sound and performance artist Tanja Schlander. Yefman’s childhood idol, Pippi Longstocking, is performed by Tanja as an adult activist artist visiting the Middle East. In one of the videos, they use Pippi’s own notion that she is ‘the strongest girl in the world’ and doesn’t believe in artificial borders and document Tanja trying to move the concrete wall that separates Israel from the West Bank at Abu Dis, an act that was recognized by local people who passed by as an expression of empathy. The work was presented at Oslo Kunstforening Gallery in 2019 including a Live Performance night with Tanja Schlander in collaboration with ULTIMA, Oslo Contemporary Music Festival.

In the series “Time Kills” Yefman examines the lives of two female tattoo artists, from two generations:  Shanghai Kate, “the godmother of American tattooing”, who had to rebel against conventional gender roles and social constructs in order to pursue her work, and Caitlin G., a young artist who lives in Brooklyn and tattoos herself, etching a visual diary onto her skin. The project takes the notion of ‘Reading’ on the skin as a framework through which the artist might begin to construct personal positions and self-determined subjects.