Oded Lifshitz clutches a microphone and addresses a conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza, in 1972, in the dining room of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Behind him, a map of Gaza frames his figure. The words Oded delivered that day are gone as is now 85-year-old Oded, who is one of an estimated 101 hostages who still remain in Hamas captivity in Gaza. It is only by chance that the black-and-white photograph documenting this moment, taken by his wife Yocheved, survives.
Both long-time peace activists, the Lifshitzs were taken hostage from their home in Nir Oz by Hamas on October 7, 2023, yet Yocheved has held fast to her principles since her release from captivity last October. “We must reach an agreement that allows both sides to live,” Lifshitz said in a recent interview. When she was freed, she famously shook hands with her captor and said —the Hebrew word for hello, goodbye, and peace. “The period that I was held in captivity only strengthened my belief,” she said.
While Lifshitz’s convictions remain intact, her lifetime photographic archive spanning nearly 70 years was lost when Hamas incinerated her home. Only 14 of her photographs remain because they were kept elsewhere, and these form a recently opened exhibition at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, , organized in collaboration with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and dedicated to the memory of the victims of October 7. The exhibition joins several others across Israel marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attack that day.
Oded Lifshitz speaks at the conference against dispossession and settlement in the Gaza Strip, held in the old dining room at Kibbutz Nir Oz, 1972. Photo: Yocheved Lifshitz. Private collection, Lifshitz family.
opens with images from the 1972 conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza and closes with a snapshot of Nir Oz residents protesting in favor of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s. “I make a very clear political statement here, connected to the situation today. It’s like we’ve gone back to the past,” said Raz Samira, the exhibition’s curator deputy director of the museum. “History shouldn’t repeat itself.”
Across town, a solo exhibition by Umm al-Fahm–based artist Said Abu Shakra also grapples with the regressions and horrors of the past year at the nonprofit Maya Gallery. Exhibiting expressive mixed-media works all created since October 7, Abu Shakra’s drawings show wild animals fighting each other to the death. There are no sides clearly pegged against each other in his world of hyenas, tigers, and bulls—just violence and a will to survive.
“I’m trying to say, this is our life today,” Abu Shakra said, who noted that he suffered a period of creative paralysis after the attack. “Our life today through the existential war of animals.”
Also included in the show is a separate series of drawings of women, including the artist’s mother. Another room in the gallery displays a paper scroll measuring tens of meters that Abu Shakra drew, a little at a time, as a sort of wartime journal. The unfurled segment on view pans from blindfolded captives loaded onto a pickup truck to crowds surrendering as an airstrike attacks overhead, and women mourning dead children.
Said Abu Shakra, Hyenas (2023). Photo: Yigal Pardo
The artist believes that the work he’s created over the past year differs from everything he created before. Before, said the artist, his existential fear wasn’t as acute. Now he focuses even more on the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery that he founded in 1996—which received official recognition as a museum this July from the Israeli Ministry of Culture—as a meeting place promoting dialogue and mutual respect.
“How can I be a proud Palestinian in the State of Israel, and also the Israeli who feels respect for the fact that he’s both here and there?” Abu Shakra asked himself. “How can I become a cultural bridge?”
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive has killed more than 41,870 people in Gaza, among them 16,765 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
Last week, Israel launched a ground operation across its northern border into Lebanon targeting the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah first attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, and has said it will not stop striking Israel until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached.
The violence of the region and its imprint on the landscape is at the heart of Israeli photographer Gaston Zvi Ickowicz’s latest body of work. His exhibition, , at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, features images of one of the sites of the October 7 attack: A field that Nova Festival attendees escaped to as they ran from Hamas. Photographed repeatedly by the artist in the year since, the images in are devoid of people but charged with memory.
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Re’im Parking Lot (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
Ickowicz has photographed various landscapes in the region since the early 2000s, including Gaza, the West Bank, and towns along the Gaza-Israel border. Never directly showing violent geopolitical tensions, his photographs expose the impact of these struggles on the landscape. In addition to one large field, in this series he photographed ditches and bushes where Nova Festival survivors told him they had hid for hours, as well as unidentifiable objects left at the festival site, later identified as molten car parts by archaeologists and criminal identification researchers working at the site.
Ickowicz also produced a video work, exhibited in a large-scale triptych screen to create immersive experience. It includes footage taken in 2018 by photojournalist Roee Idan, who had collaborated with Ickowicz on a work called . After Idan was murdered at his home in Kfar Aza on October 7, in front of his three-year-old daughter Avigail who was then taken hostage, Ickowicz received permission from Idan’s family to incorporate his raw materials into .
The feeling that comes across when watching the video is of “disorientation, an inability to place yourself in relation to the space,” said exhibition curator and the museum’s curator of photography, Gilad Reich. “Like the survivors who ran in the field without knowing which direction they were running in and what awaited them at the other end of the field.”
Elsewhere in the country, exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (which borders what has now become Hostages Square) highlight paintings by Kfar Aza-based Tal Mazliach who survived the attack, and a group exhibition of artworks by Israeli artists created since October 7. A site-specific installation by Arab-Israeli artist Muhammad Abo Salme, , transforms 500 kilometers of metal dog-tag chains into a weighted and weightless image of mourning.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
