Making hostages a centerpiece, a Tel Aviv museum becomes a showcase for wartime agility

Its valuables are out of storage and new shows are being planned, but the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, ground zero for the hostage struggle, is still readying for whatever war may bring

Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art after October 7, 2023 (Guy Yechiely)
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art after October 7, 2023 (Guy Yechiely)

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Tania Coen-Uzzielli was heading home to Israel from Florence, Italy, where the Italian-born director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art had attended a conference about art patronage.

As Coen-Uzzielli read updates about the unfolding atrocities taking place in Israel’s south and the barrage of rockets targeting much of the rest of the country, her staff began packing up the Alberto Giacometti exhibit, a retrospective of the Swiss sculptor being shown at the museum’s annex. A worried call was made to the French foundation that holds the collection about how to get the works back to Paris as quickly as possible.

By the next day, the museum staff was putting other valuable artworks into underground storage.

The institution shuttered its doors in the post-October 7 tumult, but its staff kept working, figuring that the museum could help the thousands of evacuees from the south who were flooding into Tel Aviv, seeking safety and distraction from the trauma and terror of the previous days.

“We thought about art and our task in the community,” said Coen-Uzzielli, “so we started to bring them here.”

Within two weeks, the museum’s outdoor plaza, featuring oversized sculptures by Menashe Kadishman and Henry Moore, had become Hostages Square, an outdoor space meant as a place of contemplation and gathering for the hostage families and their supporters.

The Shabbat dinner table installation first placed in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square in October 2023 (Credit Guy Yechiely)

The ad hoc organization that formed to support the hostage families had requested the use of the museum plaza because of its position across the street from the Defense Ministry compound, where crucial decisions were being made relating to their loved ones.

Eventually, the area would become the focus of protests and rallies, but before all that, it was a simply a space for installations drawing attention to the plight of the hostages and their families.

The very first one, two weeks after the attack, was a long Shabbat table set for the hostages, with highchairs, children’s cups and white roses at some of the place settings.

Coen-Uzzielli recommended placing the table so it would lead out from the museum’s front doors, but otherwise ceded all decisions about how to use the space to the then-fledgling Hostages Forum.

“It made us think about what was our job as a public resource, and we had this moment to realize what we could and couldn’t do for them,” she said. “The placement of this in the museum plaza gave it a certain tone, but it wasn’t ours, even though we’re the art museum.”

The relationship between the art institution and the hostage families has persisted over the last 15 months and will continue as long as there are hostages in Gaza, said Coen-Uzzielli, who has been director of the museum since 2019 and was formerly head of curatorial affairs at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

More than just offering real estate, the process has changed the art institution and reinforced its determination to remain a guiding force in the Israeli art world.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art welcomed all kinds of visitors and activities in the first weeks and months after October 7, 2023 (Credit Guy Yechiely)

The museum, like all others in the country, was closed for the first six weeks of the war but offered art lectures on Zoom and activities for kids who had been evacuated.

When it reopened in November, it had realigned the exhibits and programming to respond to the unfolding situation.

By that time, Hostages Square had been completely transformed, with tents set up for gatherings and discussions, merchandise with the “Bring Them Home Now” slogan for sale, and small stages built for impromptu speeches and presentations by hostage family members.

In those first months, the museum offered organizers storage space, and allowed participants to use its bathrooms, as well as take shelter in protected spaces when rocket sirens sounded, particularly during the hostage rallies attended by thousands each Saturday night.

The institution’s lobby became a space for Friday morning yoga classes held in support of hostage Carmel Gat, before she was killed at the end of August 2024 by her Hamas captors, as well as Shabbat services on Friday evening organized by some of the kibbutz communities that had been invaded.

One of the many hostage installations in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square since October 2023 (Credit Kobi Wolf)

There were eventually therapeutic tours and museum meetings for the bereaved, the injured, and survivors of the Nova desert rave.

“A museum can take any temperature,” said Coen-Uzzielli. “That’s its superpower, to be agile and resilient. To deal with what’s happening and not simply close its doors and go home.”

Doing so requires a constant balancing act by the museum, to keep within its mandate of offering the public access to art while recognizing the deep pain that was being marked outside its doors.

With the rocket fire largely subsiding in recent months, many of the artworks have recently emerged from storage and returned to their rightful places on the gallery walls.

‘A mirror on society’

At the same time, the museum, like many Israeli museums, has been grappling with the international art world’s reaction to October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Coen-Uzzielli was one of several Israeli museum directors to respond publicly to an open letter circulated by Artforum a few weeks after the Hamas attack that called for an end to “institutional silence around the ongoing humanitarian crisis that 2.3 million Palestinians are facing in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.”

She discovered that all international projects and collaborations with Israeli art institutions were on hold, first because of the war and then because of pro-Palestinian cultural boycotts aimed at isolating the country.

Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Photo by Hadas Parush)

“They wrote to us and said, ‘We don’t want to be in touch with you,’ and we got that we had to figure this out for the long term,” said Coen-Uzzielli.

Without international loans and with many of its valuable pieces held in storage, the museum staff had to get even more creative.

They put together “To Catch a Fleeting Moment: 150 Years to Impressionism,” open from July to December 14 with major works loaned by Jewish collector friends of the museum and with an emphasis on Impressionist artists working on pieces after the world wars, an angle that resonated with visitors, said Coen-Uzzielli.

There is “Cascade,” by lighting artist Muhammad Abo Salme, an installation consisting of thousands of meters of metal bead chains of the kind used in military dog tags — the kind also used to express solidarity with the hostages.

Abo Salme is a Bedouin artist who once lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the hardest-hit communities in the south, and he wants to show something of his connection as an Arab to the tragedies of the past months.

The bald expression of empathy with Jewish suffering sometimes perturbs Arab visitors to the museum, according to Coen-Uzzielli, but she spoke proudly of the fact that the museum had continued offering a program for Arabic-speaking schools.

“A museum can hold all those sides,” said Coen-Uzzielli. “Israeli society does that too, and the museum is a kind of mirror on society, that it can be that kind of complicated place.”

An ode to Impressionism with the ‘To Catch a Fleeting Moment’ exhibit, July through December 2024 (Credit Elad Sarig)

Museums are meant to generate questions and not necessarily offer answers, she added.

“We’re different people now since the 7th,” the curator said. “Sometimes we see things differently and we’re more sensitive to what can poke at people and set them off.”

An exhibit about the woman’s body and what can be done to it had been planned for 2024, but due to the atrocities of October 7, including sexual violence, it has been postponed.

Over the next year, coming exhibits will showcase women and Arab artists. There will also be a focus on Israeli artists, who have less of an international platform to turn to right now.

“We’re seen as this combative country in the art world, but we at the museum can show another side. We’re a platform for this complexity,” said Coen-Uzzielli. “I believe that some [of our international colleagues] will come back and some won’t. We need agility to be able to react to what happens next.”

A young visitor contemplating an artwork at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which later put the painting into storage during the relentless rocket attacks (Credit Guy Yechiely)

Coen-Uzzielli said the museum’s plans are in place through summer 2025. That’s a far shorter lead time than usual, but the institution need to be more agile than in the past, cognizant of what can change.

“We’re in a planning mode,” said Coen-Uzzielli, “depending on how the situation develops.”

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