My Life at the Moment. Now that’s a moniker that stops you in your tracks and begs you to pause and consider the inference thereof. It greets you as you enter the display space at Beit Avi Chai where an exhibition of that name opened last week.
The title is a quote from late celebrated Jerusalemite poet Israel Eliraz, from a line in a poem published in his 2011 tome Is It Getting Brighter.
This is a quintessentially Jerusalemite exhibition, in that all five artists live in the capital – although, sadly, the subject matter touches everyone who lives in this country. The bookended subtitle – October 2023-October 2025 – spells it out in no uncertain terms. All the works came into being during the course of the last war in Gaza, including in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities committed by Hamas down south.
That, in itself, implies some authentic added value. By definition, by virtue of the time of their creation, the works offer a direct conduit to the feelings at the time – feelings, it must be said, that linger on in all of us as we continue to grapple with the events that took place on that fateful day over two years ago now, and their echoing, haunting ripples.
Art, reality, and ‘muddying the waters’
“I don’t feel this is an exhibition about the war,” co-curator Amichai Chasson surprises me when we begin to view the works. This despite the fact that, in addition to the time of their inception, the exhibitor lineup includes a couple of artists who served long stretches in the reserves over the two-year period – Elkana Levi and Meydad Elyahu. The former portrays himself in soldier uniform, while Elyahu’s monochrome watercolor Nahal Oz and Ruhama series include images of soldiers.
Chasson, who shared curatorial duties with Rika Grinfeld Barnea, bases his approach on a tenet that lies at the core of all creative fields. “I think, first and foremost, the exhibition talks about the relationship between art and reality,” he says. “You have works here that really connect with the war; they are really in your face. But there are also abstract works. It is not entirely clear how the abstract ones relate to the war.”
That, in principle, is of course perfectly legit. After all, it is not up to the artists to dictate to us what we should see in their work and how we should interpret it. Chasson admits to intentionally “muddying the waters.”
“We wanted to generate the possibility of viewing the full scope – what happened in the rear, what happened on the frontline.” And what was taking place inside, inside all of us? “Yes, that is definitely part of the thinking behind this,” comes the swift reply.
Staying close to home
The philosophy behind My Life at the Moment ran along circuitous lines. “In general, the majority of the exhibitions that deal with Oct. 7 comprise photographs from Gaza, and from the Supernova festival,” Chasson posits. Not for him the direct approach. “I don’t have a problem with that,” he hastens to add.
“I think that is important, but that is not what we wanted to show. We wanted to show how art impacted on five Jerusalemite artists: That is important, too.” He says it is a matter of staying close to home, a highly charged aspect of life in the wake of the Israeli hostage calamity. “In the final analysis, we are part of a community here: of Jerusalem art.”
In a poll recently conducted by the Academy of the Hebrew Language (AHL) habayta – homeward – was voted the Hebrew word of the year for 2025. Chasson says he and Grinfeld Barnea followed a similar line of thought. “The quote from Israel Eliraz talks about the here and now; it is what it is. We don’t want to get away from things by talking about big issues, political implications and all that: No. This is what happened to us. Let’s take the time to reflect on it.”
Portrait of the artist as a reserve soldier
The exhibits certainly facilitate that, from all sorts of physical, spiritual, and emotional angles. You can’t possibly take a look at Levi’s Noah’s Ark without feeling something shift inside you. In it he portrays himself, fresh back from yet another tour of military duty. He hasn’t even had the time, or possibly the strength, to change out of his uniform.
He sits slumped in his rocking chair with his somewhat bewildered-looking infant daughter in his lap, her dad holding a polychromic toy version of the titular biblical vessel in front of her in his right hand. Levi looks worn thin, physically and emotionally, his left arm dangling by his side clutching a paintbrush in his limp hand.
There is nothing hidden or abstract about his section of the show, which goes by the simple, if not glaringly simplistic, name of Portrait of the Artist as a Reserve Soldier. Levi didn’t just feed off his reserve duty experiences; he took a sketchbook with him wherever he was stationed, straight after Oct. 7, and drew what he saw and caught with his senses right in the thick of things. The rough drafts gestated and eventually sparked his patiently crafted large-scale oil paintings.
As the curators note in the exhibition catalog there was a healing element to the process: “The slow, deliberate work in oil became a means of psychological processing: a way to contend with the constant tension and compressed time of the battlefield.”
You can’t miss the oxymoronic juxtapositioning of his angelic innocent babe in arms with her soldier father who, no doubt, had just witnessed some horrific scenes and violence. Levi manages to convey a similar sensibility, eloquently and palpably, in an even larger canvas called Portrait of the Artist in Respite no. 1.
It is a sort of super-realistic work – at least in terms of concept – which has Levi in khaki at his easel looking down at us when we catch him in mid-creative flow. He has a look of withered determination with his weapon propped up against the back wall. It is as if he is saying something along the lines of “What did you expect me to do on my time away from the war, if not paint? This is how I deal with it all.”
Seeing, not seeing, and distorted reflection
Veering just a mite away from realism, Alon Kedem’s I Always Want Eyes two-parter takes a potshot at the nuanced – to use a delicate epithet – coverage of the war and how it was fed through to the public. Seeing You Seeing Me spells that out in no uncertain terms.
It is a multicolored portrayal of a bespectacled face with images ping-ponged back to the viewer. The lenses distort the reflection of the person in front of the gazer and partially obscure his eyes. Kedem’s discomfort, frustration, and disgust with the way news outlets and social media channels portrayed Oct. 7 and the ensuing war are there for the taking.
His other oil painting on coarse, jute canvas at Beit Avi Chai is a particularly stirring piece called We’ll Arrive Soon. There is something disturbing and downright spooky about the scene in which we see a bus devoid of passengers being driven by a bearded character who doesn’t appear to be certain where he is going. The road on which the vehicle is traveling is flanked by yellow expanses that appear to be fields – kibbutz fields, no doubt – belonging to a community ravaged by the Hamas terrorists.
The driver’s blank, clearly perturbed expression put me in mind of a blood-curdling scene – one of many – in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah epic in which a train driver reenacts his former job transporting Jews to the Treblinka concentration camp. As he nears a bend in the tracks, just before the then-already desolate site, he looks back expecting to see the train cars full of Jews whom he is taking to their certain death. He knows the cars aren’t there but his face distorts into an extremely anguished expression.
Home, intimacy, routine under fire, and wings
The subject of home, domesticity, and the concomitant emotional anchor recurs powerfully and touchingly in Noga Greenberg’s A Plea for Intimacy series of 35mm. analog photographs. The ambiance of her chosen scenes ostensibly exudes a sense of harmony and cherished wellbeing within the presumably secure confines of the immediate family framework.
“Noga brings us a snapshot of the home front,” says Chasson. “It is a sort of photographic essay in which she shows how the day starts at home, day after day, between the sirens, the media reports: routine. Yes, that’s while a war is in progress, but it is routine,” the curator adds, reprising his opening observation about the umbilical cord between artistic endeavor and the everyday life that fuels it.
Greenberg proffers what is possibly the most antithetical of the works on display, a birthday celebration while our hostages continue to languish in unspeakable conditions in Gaza and parents bury their children. The life-death seesaw also comes across in a large print of broad-winged birds wheeling their way insouciantly and naturally across the sky, free to roam whither they wish, or need, while we humans go about our business under the weighty pall of warfare.
Raya Bruckenthal’s monochrome etchings take us back into the twilight zone between realism and abstraction. She also manages to keep us on our toes with her works. What looks like a series of pictures of large densely-packed feathered wings – possibly belonging to benign protective celestial beings – takes on a very different meaning when you get up close.
The feathers are, in fact, knives. “They are the knives of the mohel [circumciser],” Chasson observes. That, he suggests, packs a powerful subtext. “You can’t get away from the fact that when a boy is born here [in Israel], he is already marked out as a potential soldier, who will serve in the army and fight in wars.”
Drawing the faces of the hostages
The other soldier-artist in the exhibitor quintet is Meydad Elyahu, who started drawing the faces of the hostages straight after Oct. 7. He produced a new sketch on an almost daily basis, and posted them on social media. His section of the show includes a couple of simulated sketchbooks, with facsimiles of the portraits, that visitors can leaf through in their own time.
Between and during stints in the reserves, Elyahu put blue watercolor to paper, determined to record the face of each and every hostage – Israeli civilians and soldiers, and non-Israelis abducted to Gaza. These are not just “hostages” or “statistics.” He notes the given name of his unwitting subjects, thereby drawing us into the lives, experiences, and tribulations of his “sitters.”
Elyahu did not beat about the bush. “Meydad started uploading his sketches of hostages to Instagram on Oct. 8,” says Chasson. “There is great importance to this work. Most of the photographs of the hostages showed them smiling. He said I can’t portray them smiling. They are in Gaza. He removed all the bits of jewelry, sunglasses, and accessories: all the trappings of freedom.”
The result is compelling. These are clearly not media-tailored images news consumers might catch in passing and express a modicum of empathy about, if any at all, before getting back to their quotidian business.
Grinfeld Barnea appreciates Elyahu’s approach to the series. “These are based on rapid sketching. Meydad normally bases his work on real life, and less on photography. Here, too, with these works from photographs, you get the experience of the moment. There is an attempt here to dig into the actual character in question.”
Elyahu’s colorful Respite gouache and watercolor series offers a polychromic snapshot of the wartime state of play that aesthetically, and thematically, neatly counterbalances the portraiture slot.
Poetry and what cannot be unseen
There is also a literary work in the layout, in the form of a poem called Prayer, by award-winning novelist and poet Yaara Shehori. The work appears in the original Hebrew, and also in English. It makes for deeply contemplative reading. The poem opens with emotive lines that conjure up powerful images and feelings:
From the dark pit come.
Out of break and storm come.
From the corners of Gaza City.
From a room without a window.
From the dark shadow of death.
Beit Avi Chai executive director Dr. David Rozenson feels that My Life at the Moment talks to us all. “When you look at the art, do you know who is religious and who is not?” he posits. You clearly don’t. Rozenson says the universal message behind the works is there in plain sight for all to see and feel. “I don’t know how eloquent the artists are. I don’t know if they are able to express themselves in words, about what they were trying to do, but it’s really quite something [how they do it] through their art.”
There is, he adds, a subliminal side to many of the exhibits that gets the message across in no uncertain terms.
“Many artists, like Modigliani, focus on the eyes. Here, some of the artists stayed away from the eyes. In Alon [Kedem]’s bus driver and Meydad [Elyahu]’s soldier you can’t really see the eyes. That is quite something. That is telling.”
It is indeed. This is a Jerusalem-infused exhibition that captures much of the emotional rollercoaster the country has endured since Oct. 7, 2023, and cannot fail to elicit a sense of poignancy and empathy and, who knows, may even help us to work through some of our emotional residue in the process.
My Life at the Moment
closes on April 30.
For more information:
www.bac.org.il/en