Yefman and Or-Ner appear in the show as problematic caricatures: Or-Ner as Bad Renro,
a hybrid of the artist’s father and Adolf Hitler; and Yefman in blackface as Penelope, the daughter of a German officer and enslaved mother from colonial Namibia. The two star
in the show’s central video work, Bad Renro and Penelope at Kibbutz Buchenwald, in
which they aimlessly roam the camp, jump headfirst into the crematorium, and fly like superheroes above the location of Kibbutz Buchenwald, now known as Netzer Sereni
after Zionist leader Enzo Sereni. The camp (now a memorial site) and the kibbutz are Althusserian ideological state apparatuses—regulated spaces into which the characters are inserted as comical rulebreakers disrupting the interpellation these places impose. 

Spectators can watch the video while sitting on Goethe Oak Bench, which references Buchenwald’s well-known tree, believed to mark the resting place of the German poet and thus spared by the Nazis who deforested the area before the camp’s construction. In the video, Bad Renro and Penelope revive the oak’s burnt stump with a seed of the resilient Ginkgo biloba, a species that served as a metaphor for intimacy in Goethe’s 1819 poem, and over a century later, in Hiroshima, survived the atomic bomb. This historical thicket embodies the intertwining of war and culture, and the characters’ grafting action offers a botanical resurrection instead of a nationalist one as an alternative narrative of survival.

The political instrumentalization of nature and femininity was a repeated motif in the show. God Full of Wombs, a felting work created
with Kuchinate, bears a monochrome image of wild flowers based on the design of a Nazi condolence card sent to bereaved German
women during the war. The work’s Hebrew title is a pun on “God Full of Mercy,” the Jewish funeral prayer, associated with Holocaust Remembrance and Memorial Day services. The work conjures the politicized portrayal—regardless of ideology or geography—of women as breeders of the nation’s soldiers.

The gender aspect of the show comes to the fore in Field Slave, a life-sized, androgynous knitted doll bearing multiple leaking breasts and penises. The work alludes to the dehumanizing misogyny of concentration camps’ brothels, where distinguished male prisoners were “rewarded” at the expense of abused and powerless female prisoners. At scheduled performances, Yefman inhabits the hollow doll, only
his eyes visible. The artist’s identity as a gay man—a group whose persecution by Nazis is severely under-acknowledged—adds another dimension to Field Slave.

This sculpture is emblematic of the show, which utilized a fastidious aesthetic translation of historic narratives into soft textile to emphasize how those stories are woven by people and as such can be manipulated to exclude certain perspectives. Moreover, Yefman allows for a haptic, unmediated experience of remembrance implicit in the production of the works. Despite the occasional use of humor, far from downplaying the severity of the Holocaust, Yefman posits a deeper consideration of the event not as the official memorials to which it is reduced, but as a living, multifaceted, intrinsic part of the contemporary—in particular, Israeli—conscience, such that the concatenation “Kibbutz Buchenwald” may exist.