Inner Skin

Gil Yefman’s exhibition “Inner Skin,” showing in Mamuta’s spaces in the basement of Hansen House, presents works made in a variety of materials and media, inspired by the story of Hansen House: Jerusalem’s “lepers’ house.” The works combine soft sculpture through knitting and felting, sound, video, and installation, addressing the space between isolation from the outside world and a place of inner refuge and calm, and the body – both familiar and foreign – which serves as both playground and arena for grappling.

In these works, skin lesions, their perforations, and their changing forms become bodily landscapes: a metaphor for society as a whole. The exhibition space also carries the attraction and revulsion that have accompanied the hospital since its founding in the 19th century: the desire to glimpse beyond its walls, mixed with fear of what happens within them.

As visitors enter the exhibition, their bodies activate the various channels of the soundtrack accompanying the works. Each visitor becomes an additional body within the display space, making it unique with every visit. The exhibition moves along the tension between attraction and revulsion, between curiosity and apprehension, seeking to look with a compassionate, embracing gaze at the illnesses and afflictions we all carry.