Strange Wreath, crochet knitting, 250cm diameter, 40 cm width, 2025
Participatory installation - exhibition view at the Tel Aviv City Museum
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 prophecy, 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.
