Be’eri gallerist finds hope and pain in exhibit about home, as she pines for her own
Sofie Berzon MacKie and her family survived the Hamas massacre on October 7; now evacuees, they’re attempting to rebuild their lives
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Photographer and curator Sofie Berzon MacKie was planning an exhibit about her Kibbutz Be’eri living room before Hamas terrorists attacked on October 7, killing, assaulting and abducting her neighbors, and destroying her community and the Be’eri gallery, where she worked for the last 13 years.
Berzon MacKie, her partner, and their three children all survived, as did her father, her two sisters, and their families.
Now they’re living, along with other displaced Be’eri survivors, in a Dead Sea hotel away from home.
Home, in fact, is the subject of her exhibit “Silvery Water and Starry Earth,” curated by Meital Manor and open January 12 through April 12 at Studio of Her Own, a gallery for Jerusalem women artists.
The focus is primarily on Berzon MacKie’s photographs of spaces that have felt like home to her, from her British mother’s ancestral home in London to the far simpler kibbutz living room of her own Be’eri home.
The exhibit begins in the main gallery of Studio of Her Own, which itself is housed in the gracious early twentieth-century home of painter Pinchas Litvinovsky, with the original brick fireplace still intact.
Here are dreamy images of Berzon MacKie’s mustard-colored tufted velvet couch, set against airy white curtains but with a focus on unlikely animals she created with AI collage imagery — a feathery swan in one picture and a wide-eyed owl in the other, each curled up on the couch.
In another room of the gallery is the velvet couch, rescued from Berzon MacKie’s home and restored, along with other objects including a stuffed owl from the kibbutz nature room and, on an outside wall, a curio box of objects that represent the artist’s life.
There are slim green volumes of Edward Lear’s poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which is another relic from Berzon MacKie’s British upbringing, recently translated and published by the artist and her brother into Hebrew.
These are the images and objects that reflect Berzon MacKie’s life and identity as the British-born daughter of an English mother and Be’eri-born-and-raised father. The second of their four children, she was seven years old when the family came to live in Be’eri.
Her parents had met when her mother, who was not Jewish, came to the kibbutz as a volunteer and fell in love with her father. For years they lived in London, but he didn’t fit in there. Then they moved to Be’eri in 1990, and two months later her mother died, quite suddenly, of leukemia.
Berzon MacKie went on to serve in the army as an intelligence officer, study photography and curation, marry and move back to Bee’ri, then divorce and stay on the kibbutz, the only place she said that has ever “truly felt like home.”
She has focused on her dual sense of citizenship in her work. She attempts to understand who she is, “and why I am the way I am, and how I view the world, and how to merge these two cultures that never really managed to stick,” she said.
“Israel does a very good job of making you feel like an outsider,” said MacKie, whose family always spoke English at home. She described her “never-ending journey of identity and culture,” and how she continues to embody that in her work.
Berzon MacKie waxed poetic about the Negev. “The story of the Negev is my story, it’s the story of living with these tensions and trying to figure out what is the deal with this place, how to feel so connected to a place that is obviously very violent at times,” she said.
Two of the portraits of Berzon Mackie’s elder son and daughter are from one of those violent periods, when the kibbutz was on a four-day lockdown and as they role-played their favorite characters to pass the time, she photographed them in fairy-like costumes against that familiar, diaphanous living room curtain.
Yet that intense period years back was nothing compared to the terrifying events of October 7.
The family woke up to loud explosions and were told to stay in their safe rooms, amid a flurry of WhatsApp messages that soon reported that the terrorists were everywhere and people were being murdered and kidnapped.
“We sat there until midnight. We thought we were never going to get out of this alive,” she said. “The world was crumbling around us.”
Some 130 people were killed at the kibbutz, others were kidnapped to Gaza; dozens of homes were burned down.
When they were finally rescued by IDF soldiers, the family was walked through the kibbutz, surrounded by troops, with bodies and blood “everywhere,” said Berzon MacKie.
They were loaded on a bus and eventually dropped at Kibbutz Shoval in the northern Negev, where local families took them in for the night.
“We were thrown into the world so violently and left without anything,” said Berzon MacKie.
In their current living situation, there’s a lot of uncertainty about “how to hold onto hope that the world is a good place, a safe place, when the reality is telling you a very different story,” she said.
Right now art helps, as did this exhibit.
“It’s how I live my life. It’s like a mechanism, it’s how my personality is built and what I do,” said Berzon MacKie.
While her computer survived, much of her archive is gone, and she’s slowly starting to create again.
Some days are better than others, said Berzon MacKie, who doesn’t see herself as an evacuee but as a refugee, abandoned by the government and army on October 7 and now.
“We went through a violent, traumatic event, we were almost murdered, our community has been through such a horrific trauma and then there’s nowhere to go to heal from that,” she said. “We were rescued under fire, people left their homes barefoot, with nothing. My home is badly damaged, my past is gone, destroyed.”
Her professional home, the Be’eri gallery where she works with artist Ziva Jelin, is situated in Tel Aviv’s Beit Romano, officially opening sometime in March. It’s very different from what she’s used to, said Berzon MacKie.
“There’s so much room in the Negev, as the periphery, as a place to build visions, with breathing room to have these weird ideas and artistic experiments and that’s the sort of freedom you have when you work there,” she said. “When you work outside Tel Aviv, you have the freedom to explore and to do things you wouldn’t be able to do in Tel Aviv.”
A new, temporary home, for now.
