In ‘Fine,’ video artwork echoing Oct 7, things are anything but

In artist Meirav Heiman’s latest video work, “Fine,” currently on exhibit at Tel Aviv’s Liebling House, very little actually is fine.

In the slow-motion disaster that unfolds in four minutes and 32 seconds, an Israeli family of four including a mother, father, teenage son and younger sister, sit down to a meal with all the familiar trappings of a holiday meal or perhaps a Friday night Shabbat dinner.

The mom is drinking red wine, the kids take bites out of succulent chicken legs and the dad serves salad, when suddenly it all falls apart, an unknown disaster from above transforming the tranquil moment into complete chaos.

It isn’t a replay of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, but it suggests the terror and fear of that day.

It’s a slowly unfolding snapshot that reflects Heiman’s fears and terrors about the war, she said, and about protecting her own children.

“Fine” wasn’t the film that Heiman had first envisioned when she began planning a new video piece for the museum, before the October 7 onslaught.

She had an entirely different idea in the works, but when the attack happened, Heiman felt she had to relate to the massacre, to those killed, and to the war that was unfolding in Gaza.

As in her previous works, Heiman wanted to capture moments of a family in the air, a familiar state in her video pieces, such as the acrobatics of “Trampoline 2010” and “Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, Children’s Room, Video Art.”

She also wanted to distill the moments when they fell, reflecting on the current state and sensibility of Israeli society.

For anyone watching the artwork from the living room space that Heiman created for viewing the work in Tel Aviv’s Liebling House, the connection is immediate — to the families that marked the Simchat Torah holiday with meals in their kibbutz homes and Sukkah huts, only to be awakened on October 7 to the horrors of the Hamas massacre.

It is a moment seared into the consciousness of Israelis.

Indeed, until recently, there were many homes in the kibbutz communities of the Gaza envelope where that day felt frozen in time, with houses left ransacked by terrorists, and temporary sukkah structures still standing on the brown grass.

“I wanted to create a freeze frame, the feeling we’re all having of fear and a lack of control,” said Heiman.

To make a five-minute video out of an idea, Heiman wrote a script and hired the Teppers, a real-life family that runs their own circus, bringing their own sense of performance art to the work.

This is a Heiman piece that has more of a narrative than some of her previous works, most of which she has created with her work partner, Ayelet Carmi.

There is the very clear Israeliness of the Tepper family featured in “Fine,” as well as their foods, their surroundings, and their looks.

The start is calm, as is the end, two bookends to the chaos that ensues amid the generic setting.

“It’s a film and a performance,” said Heiman. “They’re a family, a real family, and the mom is drinking wine because she wants to forget everything for a moment, and the father is the one who holds things together, and there’s a kid who’s a bit of a cynic and holding on to her phone throughout it all.”

Heiman, working with co-director Shabtai Yitzhak-Eden, was able to let it all unfold slowly, thanks to the “super-slow camera” that chief cinematographer Benny Mali used, with around 1,000 frames per second, unlike the usual 24 or 25 frames per second in a regular video.

The imagery also reflects the photos Israelis saw on social media on October 7 from events unfolding in the south, before army units reached the kibbutzim, and before the television cameras arrived.

Finally, Heiman connects the piece to Liebling House, the historic Bauhaus modernist building that was once a private home and was turned into a permanent exhibition about Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture, with rooms for rotating exhibits.

She created a generic-looking living room with curator Sabrina Cegla in the gallery for watching the video, with the idea of bringing visitors into a home to watch the chaotic scene unfold, much like what happened in people’s houses on October 7.

As a piece reflecting Israel in 2025, it offers internal and external views of what’s happening around us, and Heiman believes it offers a sense of consolation.

Like all her works, said Heiman, who holds a BFA from the photography department at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, “Fine” is very Israeli and reflects who she is, an Israeli artist grappling with the realities of life in this country.

“Art lets you take a break to find some sense of consolation,” said Heiman. “Culture does that for you.”

“Fine” will be exhibited at Liebling House through June 14, 2025.