If journalism is the first draft of history, then art reflects the emotions that accompany that history. A major new Tel Aviv art exhibition, 07SH10AH23, in which a group of Israeli artists present their vision of the events of Oct. 7, opened on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The exhibition, which was set to run for a week, has been extended until May 14, and there are plans for it to travel to Europe.
Curated by Simon Durban, an influential figure in the art scene who used to be street artist Banksy’s business manager, 07SH10AH23 features all kinds of art – paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, and more, with diverse styles.
It includes pieces by artists who survived the Hamas massacre on the kibbutzim and towns and at the Supernova music festival, and by soldiers who took part in fighting the terrorists, as well as others who were not directly involved but sought to portray the event in their work.
It’s very moving to walk through this stunning group of works, which translate the pain and loss of that day into images and textures. Days after Durban gave me a preview of the exhibition, I found my mind turning back to different works from the show. While each piece is unique and evocative on its own, the cumulative effect of seeing the works in a single gallery is especially powerful.
While we’ve all read countless articles about the events of Oct. 7, seeing the art in this show brings home the reality with great intensity and none of the distance and filters that come with news stories.
Durban, who is British and divides his time between London and Tel Aviv, has a deep connection to Israel, dating back to when he was the only Jewish volunteer at Kibbutz Magen, right near the Gaza border, in the late 1980s. Last year on a visit to Israel, when he toured sites of the massacre, he met artist and businessman Motti Yeshaya, who had a space that Durban felt would be perfect for an exhibition.
“I gave it some thought. I’d been to Nova and I’d been to Kfar Aza, and I’d been completely engaged with Oct. 7 and everything that’s happened since, and it just felt incredibly important to try to present something that would commemorate Oct. 7 in some way.”
As he spent more time in Israel, he realized, “Every single person in Israel has changed in some way as a result of what happened on Oct. 7. It felt to me like a deep change in the psyche of Israelis, as if a small part of the light had gone out… The more I talked to artists and the more I engaged with them… and the more I saw their works, the more I felt that if I could in some way project this change in the psyche, that would be the ideal way to dress this exhibition up.”
While he acknowledged that portraying the psyche through art is challenging, “I could see that [the post-Oct. 7 change] was coming out in the works. With some people, there was a certain edge, with others there was a softness – they were drawn to things around the female form, based on testimony and what we were hearing and seeing about how women and girls were treated. It came out, but in a very soft way.”
Among the works that spotlight women are sculptures by Chen Ziv, which come with the sign “Please touch,” the opposite of what you see in most galleries or museums. One is of a woman kneeling, her spine exposed, while the other is of a woman, head in hands, whose legs are crossed but whose body is missing. Both express a great deal about the atrocities of the massacre in a way that words can’t.
Durban didn’t know the work of these artists prior to Oct. 7 but began to search out artists once the idea for the show began to crystallize.
Former hostage's jewelry shines bright
MORAN STELLA YANAI is an artist who makes jewelry, and her work is presented in the show. She was kidnapped from the Supernova music festival by Hamas and released after nearly two months in the late 2023 hostage deal. Following her release, she has spoken tirelessly to raise awareness around the world about the plight of the remaining hostages – 59 of them are still held in Gaza.
For 07SH10AH23, she has recreated the jewelry stall she had at the Supernova music festival as closely as possible and added some new works she created following her release.
The stall features such objects as an inventory list on notebook paper; cups from the beverages she was drinking in the early hours of the morning before the attack started; a purse with the words “Perfectly Imperfect” written on it; and the jewelry, which includes a bracelet made of stars and other items – some delicate, others bolder. She has spoken in the past about how it was the first time she felt confident enough to sell her jewelry, and there’s a certain modesty about her stall.
She has continued to create, and there are new items as well, such as a picture called The Girl with the Hope, which was inspired by a Banksy work that shows a girl with a balloon and was meant to represent children in the West Bank and other conflict zones. Banksy is an artist Yanai admires, even if she doesn’t always agree with him politically. Her picture depicts a little girl in a rubble-filled tunnel holding a single yellow balloon, an obvious reference to the hostages and an illustration of her emotional state during captivity.
In a brief interview following her return from Poland, where she took part in a delegation of hostage families and released hostages to raise awareness about those still held in Gaza, Yanai said, “Before Oct. 7, I had planned a certain path in life, where I would be working on jewelry, writing a book, designing clothes – that was the dream.
“After Oct. 7, whether I chose or not, it changed the path so that for the past year and a half, I’ve found myself more as a lecturer, more as someone trying to find ways of coping, someone who finds ways to help people cope with the process [of coming to terms with the tragedy]. I’ve also helped myself on the way, and I found my voice again through this. So today, presenting this new stall and this new collection, it’s the closing of a circle.”
She has spoken of the terror she felt on Oct. 7 as she fled and tried to hide from the terrorists, as well as the physical and psychological torture she endured in captivity and the abuse of other hostages she witnessed. Given that, it won’t surprise anyone familiar with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that it was hard for her to even touch the jewelry she was selling at the moment the attack broke out.
“For me, working on the exhibit was an emotional closure because physically I couldn’t touch the jewelry that survived the Supernova until Simon reached out to me and helped me come to that closure that I had delayed for a year and a half.
“First of all, the fact that I could physically touch the jewelry that survived the Supernova was already a process in and of itself. I tried in the past year and a half to get to a place where I could do that, and they gave me a deadline and I had to deal with that. For me, at first, maybe it seemed difficult, even impossible; but like a lot of impossible things in life, it became possible.
“And now the exhibit is up, after I closed a circle [in dealing with] the materials that survived the Supernova, I found a new language for working with them and creating new things,” she said.
MANY OF the artists, it seems, found a new language as Yanai did, whether they lived through the massacre as survivors or as Israelis watching the events unfold.
Matan Sacofsky, an Anglo-Israeli artist and filmmaker, was called up to fight on Oct. 7 and has spent more than 250 days since in active duty in Gaza. He has two pieces in the exhibition. One is a collage composed of shell casings from the battles in the Gaza border communities and from Gaza itself, which has visual power even if you don’t know the background. The second work shows flowers in a vase, still blooming, in front of a blood-red wall.
Haran Kislev, a lifelong resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, has two paintings in the show – Kibbutz Upon a Time; and Then We Drove to the Kibbutz and We Drove to the Parking Lot 2 – that use color and composition to evoke the experience of that day.
Jonathan Cuperman collected fragments from the ambulance at the music festival where 18 men and women were murdered, and transformed them into a memorial sculpture called 18 Angels, with the victims’ names etched onto curved sheets of metal.
Michal Worke often focuses on the Beta Israel (Ethiopian) community, and several of her paintings feature the anguished journey of Avera Mengistu, the mentally ill Israeli of Ethiopian descent who wandered across the border and was held by Hamas for over a decade, before being released earlier this year.
Some works reflect the connection between the Holocaust and Oct. 7. Hadar Gad’s two paintings, Lupochowa Forest and On the Very Same Thing (named after an essay by poet Leah Goldberg), show trees where Jews were massacred in Poland that are beautiful but offer no shelter, and a distant house behind a fence.
Said Durban, “I feel like we’ve achieved what we wanted to… I think this is the right time for this exhibition. I think if it had been maybe six, nine, or 12 months earlier, I would have hit more stumbling blocks where the artists wouldn’t have been ready… It’s a hard title, trying to make this correlation between the Shoah and Oct. 7… but beyond just that headline title, it’s a great body of work, it really is.”
For more information: 07sh10ah23.com