Lost Ship

The exhibition “Zman Emet 2 – Artists Respond to Time and Place”

at Beit Hankin Art Gallery, Kfar Yehoshua, curated by Neta Haber and Eilat Hertz-Wolf, invited seventeen artists to create new works directly on the walls of the former office floors in the village, in April 2025.

In this work, Yakobi continues to explore imagery of emergency and distress. As a young artist who has already experienced - from the start of her art studies - the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, war, street unrest and uninterrupted states of emergency, she investigates expressions of disruption, alienation and uncertainty in her works.
In her previous exhibition she based her creation on illustrations from an aircraft emergency instructions leaflet, using the naïve drawings as an artistic point of departure.
This mural work is based on an illustration from 1790 of the slave ship Brooks, which depicts how the African captives were “stored” in the ship’s hold - men, women and boys separately. At first glance the illustration appears as a decorative, ornamental and attractive textile pattern, but upon closer inspection the horror is revealed.
The ship, rolling on the sea, embodies a non-territory, and no safe land awaits its human “cargo” whose control over destiny has been taken from it.
The base color in her previous works, as well as in this one - a fluorescent yellow paint that glows in the dark - is commonly used to mark entrance and exit routes in public shelters. When the room darkens, the human dimension disappears from the painting, and only the yellow emergency glow remains visible in the darkness.

Credit:
Curatorial text by Neta Haber and Eilat Hertz-Wolf, originally published in Hebrew by Beit Hankin Art Gallery.