Sommer Contemporary Art is delighted to announce the opening of Rona Yefman‘s exhibition Radio Netiva at the CCA Tel Aviv. This is Yefman’s first institutional solo presentation in Israel, curated by Tamar Margalit.

Yefman’s new body of work 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.”