"Rona Yefman and Tanja Schlander: Never Violence"

Multidisciplinary artist Rona Yefman often engages with issues of gender and feminine representation. Her art includes long-term collaborations with radical personalities who dictate the absurd and iconic images of our time. She is particularly interested in photography. According to Yefman, the camera allows things to happen. Through it the artist can find freedom and passion and explore different kinds of life and existence.

Since childhood Yefman has imagined the classic children's heroine Pipi Longstocking as her alter-ego, as the "strongest girl in the world" and as an orphan born from trauma, who became an independent girl with subversive ideas that expose the hypocrisy of adults. Swedish author Astrid Lingren wrote the famous children's story in 1944, wishing to encourage her daughter to defy the conventions of normative feminine behavior. Today Pipi Longstocking is the queer feminist icon of children's literature. She continues to serve as a role model for youth and children who enjoy dressing up as Pipi on World book Day and on holidays such as Halloween and Purim.

In the work Yefman created in collaboration with Tanja Schlander, a Danish artist, she turned Pipi into a contemporary heroine. Tanja, who appears in the film Pipi L. at Abu Dis, is shown, among other things, absurdly trying to move the West Bank Barrier that separates Israel from the territories of the Palestinian Authority. The omnipotent woman-child tries, rather naively, to push the massive concrete wall, seeking to create a change with her own powers. Yefman and Schlander use the wall as a symbol of a stubborn element that cannot be changed, in the local Middle Eastern context. They seek to encourage interaction between the people living near the wall in order to express solidarity. Through this encounter Pipi stubbornly insists on creating a new reality.

Pipi, played by Tanja, is a character with great sensitivity and empathy for the entire world. In Yefman's and Schlander's new film, The Burnt Forest, shown here for the first time, Pipi is seen walking through a burnt forest, mourning the trees, hugging them, listening to them, and recording them. The film emphasizes that beyond our pathetic wars, the destruction of trees is itself dangerous for the future of mankind.

As in other collaborative works with leading figures, Yefman returned to film Schlander-as-Pipi in the course of several years. She thereby blurred the boundaries between imagination and reality, between fiction and documentation, and between the character and the actress.

This project continues Yefman's engagement with the themes of belonging, alienation, the search for the "authentic self" in a limiting society, and the typically human attraction to the other. In her words, "I am interested in margins of all kinds – social, mental, and gender-based. I am interested in working with the tension between mainstream and periphery, as well as with social criticism regarding power relations in various territories."

This duality, of rebelliousness alongside a turn to conformity, characterizes Yefman's work over the years. It is often accompanied by tension between the outsider's feeling of alienation and the yearning to belong.

Text: Noa Flecker

Rona Yefman was born in Haifa in 1972. She lives and works in New York, USA and in Kiryat Tiv'on

Tanja Schlander was born in 1974. She lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark