For the Ein Hayam (Eye of the Sea) exhibition (CCA Tel Aviv, 2016) Efrati revisited her grandparents' apartment in Haifa, and shares her childhood memories with the viewers at the gallery. The common ground is again rooted in the generic architecture of the “shikunim” – Israeli housing projects built during the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate waves of new immigrants. All these buildings share a number of common features – plastic shutters, terrazzo tiled floors and balcony lattices made of modular concrete cast in the manner of the oriental “mashrabiya.” Efrati takes some of these elements and literally “passes them” through the strong light she recalls washing her grandparents’ downtown Haifa flat in her childhood. This means that we experience the shutters only as an imprint of fading color on a reproduction on the wall in Rodica, and the sea peering through the balcony’s Mashrabiya.

Just as in Neorealist films, in Yael Efrati’s work there is little distinction between the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, where manipulated ordinary objects activate in the viewers the sensor-motor mechanism that opens up to different personal and collective narratives.