Tel Aviv art museum marks Oct. 7: ‘Take time to visit quietly, you will find light’
Institution and its ‘Hostages Square’ plaza have become focus for protests and healing; new exhibit features works showcasing responses by artists, including from Kfar Aza survivor
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
As the Tel Aviv Museum of Art marks nearly a year since October 7, when its outdoor plaza became Hostages Square and its galleries turned into gathering spaces for survivors and their therapies, the institution has opened several exhibits examining the artistic responses to the tragedy.
Three new exhibits include “Tal Mazliach: War Decorations,” “I Don’t Want to Forget” from the post-October 7 collection of Mareva and Arthur Essebag, and video works from mobile museum Zumu.
“There’s a tension between how we remain an art institution and how we welcome the community,” said Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, describing the weekly yoga sessions first in support and now in memory of murdered hostage Carmel Gat, art therapy groups and Friday afternoon Kabbalat Shabbat services for one of the evacuated Negev kibbutz communities. “It’s all threaded through our current reality.”
One of the responses to the tensions and protests outside the museum’s doors is “I Don’t Want to Forget,” curated by Marie Shek from the collection of French couple Mareva and Arthur Essebag, who collected more than 100 works of Israeli artists after October 7, in response to the antisemitism and denials following the Hamas massacre and atrocities.
“It will take generations to recover and collecting art is a way to remember what happened,” said Arthur Essebag, the French news presenter and producer who spoke at the museum as the exhibit opened, and has been posting regularly about Israel and October 7 on social media, including creating a commercial about antisemitism that was broadcast widely in June.
The Essebag exhibit includes artworks by 25 Israeli artists, all from the couple’s collection, most of which were created by the participating artists in response to October 7. The Essebags asked each artist to choose an artwork for them, rather than choosing themselves.
There is “Lemons in Wartime,” Osnat Ben Dov’s photograph of a bag of lemons, taken about two weeks after October 7.
Ben Dov’s works were featured in an exhibit at the Kibbutz Be’eri gallery when the gallery was burned by Hamas terrorists on October 7. She hosted gallery curator Sophie Berzon Mackie and her family in the first weeks after they were evacuated from their Kibbutz Be’eri home.
This print shows a bag of moldering lemons, forgotten in those first terrifying days, said Ben Dov, who thinks of the fruit as survivors.
Shai Azoulay’s “Post 7” is his oil on canvas work of tiny thumbprint figures running across a wide expanse of desert, harkening to the Supernova desert rave victims, as well as its survivors.
Tsibi Geva’s “After the Party #5” is dark, a gray and black depiction of the atrocities committed by the Hamas terrorists on that day, as is Lihi Turjeman’s “A Mournful Chorus,” of birds sitting on a telephone wire, while Sigalit Landau’s statue sits on a pedestal, a figure sitting among the skulls of her loved ones.
“This is all a little bit dark,” said Essebag, gesturing with his hand toward the artworks hung in the gallery, “it’s a whispering place. But if you take time to visit quietly, you will find light.”
Essebag is also working on a coffee table book about the exhibit and planning to display the exhibit at museums around the world, to expose the reactions and stories of October 7.
He’s also showing the other artworks in his October 7 collection in a Jaffa warehouse, hoping that the younger generation sees the works as well.
The museum is also opening “Tal Mazliach: War Decorations” on September 19, the artist’s very personal look back at what happened to her on October 7, as she hid under a blanket in her Kibbutz Kfar Aza sealed room, which also functions as her studio.
Mazliach, who was born and raised at the kibbutz and still lives there, spent 20 hours in her sealed room, until she was saved by members of the IDF’s Shaldag unit.
The small, square canvases, all featuring Mazliach’s familiar colorful, crowded acrylics, tell what happened to her that day, with imagery of soldiers, guns and Hamas blindfolds, of words and phrases repeated as a kind of mantra.
They also refer to the weeks after October 7, when Mazliach went to stay with her brother who lives on a moshav near the West Bank.
“It’s super specific and personal and what she went through on that Shabbat,” said Amit Shemma, who curated the exhibit.
Next to the Essebag exhibit is the museum gallery hosting the Zumu mobile museum’s exhibit, “’73–’23: Video Salon Between Two Wars,” an anthology of 50 video works that were created during and between the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 2023 October 7 Hamas attack, shedding light on the issues that arose and exist, then and now.
Visitors are invited to sit on one of the three couches and spend some time watching footage about veterans, PTSD and the specific topics and issues that connect both of the Israeli disasters. The museum will also host talks relating to the Zumu exhibit, throughout the month.
