Gil Yefman

Gil Yefman: Trans(A)gression, The Israeli Center for Digital Art

Dates: 10 April 2021 – 26 July 2021

Curator: Udi Edelman

Production: Avigail Surovich

Sound design and programming: Giori Politi

Arduino programming: Zvika Markfeld

Photos by: Lena Gomon

The exhibitions and performances are supported by Artport. 

This exhibition creates an enveloping space composed of felted and knitted objects, resembling duplicated internal organs. Electronic sensing devices are embedded into the organs – security cameras, loudspeakers, and microphones – that register and emit impressions. They react to the people present in the space, creating a sense of wandering inside an organic body. But this is not a distinct body; internal organs are externalised or inverted from the outside inwards, floating beside others. An intimate, visceral experience.

The objects evoke memories of positions the body carries within it, a history of touch and sense, both personal and public. A sequence of organs or celestial bodies that generate a body. At times it is the whole universe, at others an accumulation of molecules, blood vessels, and flesh. A bodily mixture constructed within systems of culture and identity. Anything that is part of personal history leaves its mark – rules and regulations, ceremonies and rituals, language, interactions, a touch, a blow, a cut, a sound, love, friends, enemies, family, country. A constantly contorting and changing body, a living body.

The array of bodies that is not one attempts to resist history and the signs, not to commit to external determinations, to regulations and order. Trans(a)gression is an expression of the sensations and experiences of gender identity inside the body. Intimate experiences of rupture between the body and its social construction, and aspiration for a reality that is not clear cut. A continuous coming into being, rather than a static construct.

Viewers transform themselves into subjects for research and observation, at times literally fusing into objects that become another organ in their body. What is it like to be a body within a body? To feel another body, to be part of a personal, community, national body.

The public is invited to feel, stroke, listen, and blend. The exhibition was created as part of a new exhibition space for projects that examine affective relationships between objects and subjects, and provide viewers with an unmediated multi-sensory experience.

Performance with Hadar Ben Meir and Shaked Leibzirer. Photos: Lena Gomon