New exhibition recreates ex-hostage’s Nova jewelry stand

Moran Stella Yanai went to the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, to sell her handmade jewelry, a venue she hoped would boost her career.

She was taken hostage by Hamas terrorists and released in November 2023 after seven weeks of humiliating, terrifying captivity.

Yanai recreated her Nova jewelry stand, one of the visceral works included in “07SH10AH23,” an art exhibit about the Hamas attack on southern Israel, curated by Simon Durban, the former manager for street artist Banksy.

More than 300 people were killed and dozens taken hostage by Hamas terrorists at the party. In total, amid the shock invasion of southern Israel, some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

The exhibit, whose name mingles the date of the attack with the word Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, opened on Holocaust Remembrance Day in a small, second-floor gallery in south Tel Aviv and is being extended through May 14.

“It was my great ambition to have Moran Stella Yanai recreate her jewelry stand from the Nova,” said curator Durban. “She was one of the first to share her story, particularly in public forums and on social media, so she came to my attention very quickly.”

Yanai’s jewelry stand — with several of the dry eucalyptus leaves that littered the ground where people ran from the marauding attackers — is situated in the center of the exhibit.

It includes the suitcase that Yanai used to transport the jewelry to the festival, along with a set of pliers brought to the site by a Hamas attacker and inadvertently tucked into the suitcase by the Israeli police officers who gathered up all the personal items left behind.

“To open the suitcase that survived, to touch the jewelry that was gathered from the ground, to smell them and remember the scents of that day — the dust, the leaves — all of which were tangible markers of the escape,” said Yanai to The Times of Israel.

Next to the jewelry stand are her new jewelry designs.

“It’s hard for me to create during this time, or to use words like ‘healing,’ when people are still in there, stripped of their humanity,” added Yanai. “I can enjoy a pleasant scent, dress comfortably, sit peacefully by the sea — but at the same time, every second brings up images of what could have been [my fate], and what is currently happening to those still imprisoned.”

Every act of creation during this period “feels like something nearly impossible — another challenge to overcome in the shadow of a harsh reality,” she said.

Durban said the exhibit was born out of that feeling.

The Jewish Londoner, 54, is a divorced father of three who is dating an Israeli woman and is in the process of immigrating to Israel.

“After October 7, I wasn’t thinking about exhibitions,” Durban told The Times of Israel. “I was absorbing shock, grief, helplessness.”

In Israel, after the October 7 Hamas attack, he began meeting with Israeli artists and saw almost immediately how they were responding with raw, visceral work.

“I felt a responsibility not just to bear witness, but to offer a platform where that collective processing could live — where the trauma, the rupture, and yes, the resilience, could be seen and felt,” said Durban. “This show isn’t about politics. It’s about human response to horror, and the way art holds space when language fails.”

There are some works made before October 7, but most were created in the last year and a half.

They include the oil-like photographs of Osnat Ben-Dov, whose work was being exhibited at the Kibbutz Be’eri gallery on October 7. They were destroyed by bullets shot by Hamas terrorists.

One of her photographs in this exhibit is of a dead bird, its blue and white feathers lush in death and reminiscent of the colors of the Israeli flag.

There are sculpted works, such as Jonathan Cuperman’s charity box that reads, “In God We Trust,” and Chen Ziv’s sculptures of a person, legs folded, head bowed in pain.

Two of Alma Gershoni’s darkly shaded works of exquisite dried flowers, familiar from the fields of the south, hang on opposite walls while Ofir Begun’s oils of Kfar Aza show what the Gaza-adjacent kibbutz looked like before large swaths of it were destroyed by Hamas.

And above Begun’s realistic oils is a thickly layered, painted work by Be’eri artist Haran Kislev, portraying, as the artist always does, the borderlands between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Durban was specifically interested in works that invite the viewer to work to understand what they are seeing.

Hadar Gad’s 2013 painting of Lupochowo Forest, depicts the site of a Nazi massacre of Jews in Poland in 1941 but reminded Durban of the Nova forest and the parallels between the events of the two places.

“I was drawn to works that didn’t attempt to explain or resolve, but instead exposed grief, rage, confusion, and tenderness,” said Durban. “These are works made in the immediate aftermath of trauma.”

Some of the works are unfinished, while some are intentionally fragile, noted Durban. There are installations made from debris, like one by artist Shibetz Cohen, who uses rockets to hit the paper and paint, in an allusion to his army service when he worked with explosives, and Matan Sacofsky’s oil work made with shell casings gathered from his reserve duty.

One of the younger artists is Eytan Baer, a 30-year-old Swiss-born artist, who immigrated to Israel on October 1, 2023, and within the week was transporting his brother to reserve duty in the north.

“That was my entry to the country; the whole story of the war is the story of my first year here,” said Baer, a multidisciplinary artist who has been helping guide visitors through the exhibit.

Three of Baer’s works are featured in the exhibit, including an oil painting whose bright layers of paint depict either a human heart or a grenade, with imagery that shows what might be a tank, a gun and a knife.

His other major work is a metal installation, with laser-cut pieces depicting a family under attack on that day, the terrorist pointing his gun, the father trying to protect his pregnant wife, small son and young daughter, the latter of whom appears outside the frame, her soul separating from the scene, according to Baer.

The exhibit ends with a bright painting of an elephant by Eden Benrubi, a Nova partygoer who was killed on October 7, never to fulfill her dream of becoming a professional artist.

“We’re trying to fulfill that dream for her,” said Baer.

The exhibit, with more than 20 artists brought together by Durban, is deeply personal for him.

He’s visited Israel many times, including more than one politically charged trip with Banksy, the pseudonymous England-based street artist and political activist. Durban’s own connection to Israel began when he was 18 and a volunteer on Kibbutz Magen, in the Gaza envelope region.

The act of curating “07SH10AH23” in Tel Aviv, in the aftermath of such tremendous loss, feels like a full circle, said Durban.

It’s “like something in me has returned,” he said, “that maybe it’s my redemption statement – to honor my people and their homeland.”