First comes the war. Then the contemporary art. The trauma always remains.
“Album Darom: Israeli Photographers in Tribute to the People of the Western Negev,” which opened recently for a six-month temporary display at the Petah Tikva Museum of Art, is the first group artistic endeavor in Israel to confront the boundless tragedy of Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, now in its ninth month. The ambitious tripartite installation Album Darom (Hebrew for “Southern Album”) incorporates a Facebook diary; a printed book (Yedioth Ahronoth, 2024) of photographs accompanied by essays; and the current exhibition, which presents the photographs alongside video works, installations, and texts.
Initiated by Prof. Dana Arieli, the dean of the faculty of design at the Holon Institute of Technology, together with chief curator Irena Gordon, the project showcases 150 photographs, art installations, and texts documenting the story of the western Negev region before and after October 7. The diverse exhibition includes the perspectives of 107 photographers and artists.
Some of the participants in the album are world renowned. Others are amateurs. Lavi Lipshitz, the youngest featured photographer, lost his life fighting in Gaza. His mother penned the text accompanying his images.
The works in the album represent different photographic practices: artistic, personal, and at times staged, the intensely personal images are disturbing. As well they should be in confronting the mass murder.
Art showing the trauma of war
Before peeking around a corner to see Lali Fruhelig’s gruesome 3-D installation suggesting a corpse sprawled on the floor of a living room, a sign cautions “The exhibition contains some potentially disturbing contents. Viewer discretion is advised.”
Arieli, a history professor and photographer who explores remembrance culture and cultural manifestations of trauma, began the Southern Album project shortly after the Gaza war broke out.
“When something’s traumatic, you have to work or do something,” she said.
Shocked by the murder of her friend Gideon Pauker from Kibbutz Nir Oz – who was butchered just before his 80th birthday – she posted 100 daily historic and contemporary images of the Western Negev.
Initially, Arieli intended “Album Darom” to be exhibited at the Kibbutz Yad Mordechai Museum just north of the Gaza Strip frontier. After the museum was damaged by rocket fire, that was no longer feasible.
Instead, she selected Petah Tikva as the venue. She explained that the site – the first Yad Lebanim memorial to fallen IDF soldiers from the War of Independence established in 1951 – is meant to be relevant to all Israelis. Thus the museum offers free admittance on Saturday.
Speaking to a group of journalists, Arieli compared October 7 to the November 4, 1995, assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. “Everyone is frozen in their memory of where they were.”
Arieli and Gordon emphasized the intended cathartic nature of their exhibition. They said the museum is a “safe space” and a “place for healing.” After experiencing the horrors of October 7, Gordon found solace in this project, she added.
“This is part of how we are coping with it all,” she said.
Miki Kratsman is one of the photographers who depicted his October 7 nightmare in the exhibition. Terrorists took his aunt Ophelia hostage from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. She was later released from captivity in Gaza in the November hostage exchange deal.
His photograph In Aunt Ophelia’s Neighborhood captures a modest kibbutz home collapsing as it is immolated in a fireball.
“These are the kinds of things that need to be in a museum,” Arieli said of the photograph. “You’re looking at the destruction of Nir Oz.”
Vividly depicting the devastation of the kibbutz, the burning home photograph is an enigma, and creates dialogue, she added.
“You can almost smell the photo,” she said, referring to the charred ruin in the image.
But it is the human toll rather than destroyed real estate which is most painful. Paradoxically, Batia Holini’s peaceful photo of exhausted IDF soldiers sleeping on the floor of a grocery store near Kfar Aza on October 8 hints at the savage warfare in which they were engaged.
Avishag Shaar-Yashuv’s photograph Funeral of Five Members of the Kutz Family Who Were Murdered in Kfar Aza captures the searing emotion of the funeral of a family annihilated in the Hamas attack.
“I tried to focus and also wipe the tears at the same time,” Shaar-Yashuv said.
For this reviewer, the most symbolic part of the exhibition was a taxidermy display of a doe titled Bambi. The exhibit references Felix Salten’s 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods and the 1942 animated movie produced by Walt Disney. Metaphorically, the hapless baby deer represents both the six million victims of the Holocaust and the 1,200 people butchered on October 7.
Viewing “Album Darom,” one could conclude that the myth of the State of Israel protecting its citizens has been shattered. Arguably, Israelis today are no more secure than their ancestors were facing the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, the Hebron Massacre of 1929, or the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941.■