Gil Yefman

“Murder at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art” - By Gil Yefman and Dov Or-Ner, 2020. This video performance shuffles documentary and fiction and embraces the familiar theme which was greatly referred to - Murder at the museum. In this case, Bad RenRo (played by Dov Or-Ner) and Penelope (played by Gil Yefman) are conducting an epidemic affair which is spread inside and beyond the museum walls. Bad and Penelope are merely the messengers - by their appearance alone they cause strange reactions within the viewers who stroll around the various wings of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Are Bad RenRo and Penelope the protagonists of this plague or whether it was already inherent in the victim's own bodies? What is the role of art in this equation? Was enough research made in order to understand it? Are Bad RenRo and Penelope saving the art by killing its audience? Art and the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with each other. Progressive movements were considered as decadent in the eyes of a no less decadent audience. The destiny of art will continue to remain in the fog. About the two protagonists: Bad Renro is a Hitler-like fictional yet very concrete figure. It was made up by the artist Dov Or Ner (born in Paris 1927) is a 93 years old Holocaust survivor and a pioneer of conceptual art in Israel. Dov’s parents were murdered in Auschwitz while he was hidden away in a convent in the south of France. As a kid Dov heard Hitler’s voice on the radio and thought it was a barking dog. This voice continued to resonate in his body, until Dov was about 80, when the voice burst out of him and created Bad RenRo. By reading Dov’s name backwards - the radicalization of both identities of the perpetrator and the victim become crystallized and inseparable. A fictional character played by Gil Yefman, Penelope is Bad Ren Ro’s companion. Penelope is wearing a terrorist mask, her dress is made of a woven fabric showing a duplicated mass grave. She is crowned with a crochet golden tooth, an object connecting death and its economy. Penelope is intertwining mythologies, transcending race and gender in pursuing deeper connections to human identities. “Kibbutz Buchenwald” is Gil Yefman’s solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which took place in 2018 as part of the Rapaport prize for a young artist in which he won in 2017. The exhibition consisted of Yefman’s long term and ongoing collaborations with the artist Dov Or-Ner and the Kuchinate collective, an organization of African women who are asylum seekers in Israel. For more information about Kibbutz Buchenwald as well as on Penelope and Bad RenRo’s complete biographies please follow this links: https://www.gilyefman.com/kibbutz-buchenwald-1 https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/gil-yefman-kibbutz-buchenwald/