The quiet after the bloodshed: Photographer captures nature in the aftermath of Oct. 7
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz brings his views and angles of the devastated Gaza border area landscape to ‘Field,’ his solo exhibit at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum
After Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, many in the art world chose to echo the terrible imagery of the day, for instance by painting tiny figures running for their lives on wide open fields, or abstract figures writhing in torment. Others looked to the sites surrounding the terrorist rampage, recreating the birds in the sky and the familiar red anemones of southern Israel in spring.
Against that backdrop, photographer Gaston Zvi Ickowicz sought to capture the quiet of the attack’s aftermath and the presence of nature, whether it was the wide tire tracks of IDF tanks in sand, cars from the Nova rave and Hamas pickup trucks that bit into the fields around the music festival’s location, or the branches, brambles and shallow ditches where partygoers had attempted to hide for hours on end.
Ickowicz’s post-October 7 works are displayed in a new Israel Museum exhibit in Jerusalem, “Field,” curated by Tamara Abramovitch and Gilad Reich, and which opened September 29.
The works include several series, including two full-color photographs, a large-scale video projection titled “Field,” and smaller, pensive black-and-white works, all offering new perspectives on the southern landscape now permanently etched into the Israeli consciousness.
Ickowicz left Israel days after the Hamas terrorist attack, taking his partner and young child to London for several weeks, escaping the immediate, terrifying aftermath of the Hamas attack.
When he returned three weeks later, he immediately sought permission from security forces to enter the fields and roads near the Nova desert rave, then considered a closed military zone.
It was there that Ickowicz first photographed the works that comprise his “Hideout” series, documenting the pits, bushes and furrows where survivors had hid for long hours from the terrorists who raided the compound.
“My vantage point was always low and looking outward,” said Ickowicz, who identified the exact hiding spots via Nova survivors who had shared their locations with family members and friends on October 7, hoping at the time to be saved.
“I often follow a place until I think the moment has come to photograph it,” he said. “It can take time, even months, and after some time, I found the angle, that moment when it returned to the exact time before the party.”
Ickowicz also spent time on Road 232, the now notorious Negev highway where Hamas terrorists massacred kibbutz residents and Nova partygoers, blocking traffic, shooting and killing those traveling in cars, attempting to escape the attack.
It was on this road that he encountered archaeologists and forensic investigators from the Israel Antiquities Authority, gathering items from the carnage.
These post-October 7 investigations were the first time in Israel’s history that archaeologists were used in the search for details and identifying items. There were pieces of vehicles that had been melted by the lethal ammunition used by the terrorists and morphed into unidentifiable items.
Those pieces of metal, shown above, were photographed by Ickowicz as portraits for “Object,” another series in the exhibit.
The archaeologists didn’t pay much attention to the items, but Ickowicz viewed them as something he’d never seen before, and there were dozens of them left on the road.
He captured images of Route 232, the blemishes of the cars that had been burned there, along with the incinerated trees on the side of the road that were later cut down, returning to the site multiple times over the course of several months.
“It offers a sense of the past, present and future, as the earth begins to grow again,” said Ickowicz.
There are other elements of regrowth and life begun anew in Ickowicz’s two-color photographs showing that now-familiar Nova field, the brown earth filled in with green grass during Israel’s springtime, at the moment of sunrise, facing east — “the moment when everything began,” said Ickowicz.
The central video work in the “Field” exhibit is visible from the main gallery of Ickowicz’s works, a 15-minute panoramic film on a loop that displays the western and eastern views from Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
It begins with several minutes of footage filmed by photojournalist Roee Idan, who lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza and was killed, along with his wife, Smadar Idan, on the morning of October 7. Idan’s murder came shortly after he filmed the terrorists making their way toward his kibbutz on paragliders and sent the footage to others at the Ynet news site, where he worked.
Idan and Ickowicz had previously collaborated when Ickowicz incorporated news footage filmed by Idan into his work “Sunset Over Gaza” (2018).
After the October 7 terrorist attack, Ickowicz returned to the materials, and with permission from Idan’s family, he integrated them into the video work, adding his footage.
The video work is in dialogue with the photographs, said Ickowicz, showing the view toward the Gaza Strip that changes with sunrise and sunset, channeling those moments on October 7, with sounds that were recorded around the Gaza envelope, the chirping of birds, the buzz of planes and drones, and the distant booms of battle in Gaza.
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