The Israel Museum opens a new exhibition dedicated to October 7, 2023

In the weeks after October 7, the museum hosted evacuee families for visits and workshops and, like many other museums, put its masterpieces into safekeeping. Now the museum has launched “The Dawn of Darkness: Elegy in Contemporary Art” in its main contemporary art gallery, through November 16. Its curator, acting museum director Suzanne Landau, drew from works in the museum’s collection, seeking to create a meditative space where each visitor could relate to the works of art and feel their feelings.

“These pieces were in my mind because I know the collection so well,” said Landau, who recently took on the role of acting museum director. After 30 years at the Israel Museum, she left in 2012 to direct the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “It was easy for me to start to think about which works could be part of this, to find the works that express this idea of elegy,” said Landau. “I started making a list.”

The space — which had been meant to house a now-postponed exhibit of Viennese artistic giants Egon Shiele, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka –is dedicated to the quiet of sadness and sorrow, to considering the losses of October 7 and to the works that describe the artists’ reactions to the pain of the past and present.

The exhibit opens with a song by Susan Philipsz, a melancholy tune that sets the mood for the works in the galleries “to the atmosphere of what we feel, all of us, each in a different way,” said Landau. “It’s something universal. This exhibit isn’t October 7, it’s more universal than that.”

One’s view is immediately grabbed by the photographs of Anthony Goicolea, born in the US to parents who immigrated from Cuba, with two massive photographs of a festive family dinner, redrawn, made into a collage and then photographed again with empty chairs for those no longer alive and missing from the family.

Alongside is a photo by Hans-Peter Feldmann of two little girls playing at some time in the 1940s. The image of one of the girls is excised from the photo although her long shadow remains, demonstrating that her spirit and soul remain forever.

Neither work was created recently, but it’s all about the context, said Landau. “I’m a big believer in context,” said Landau. “If you put the same artwork in a different context, it gains a different meaning. That’s what happened here.”

The only work in “Elegy” that was created in the wake of October 7 was by Israeli artist Shuki Borkovsky, who sent Landau a message with images of what he was working on.

On each day of the war, Borkovsky drew the word “tear,” written in various languages, in English, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic and Yiddish. He did so every day, said Landau, using a graph paper notebook that he’d purchased in Jerusalem’s Old City years earlier.

Using a double spread of pages each time, Borkovsky wrote the word “tear” using different typographies, creating a collection of some 160 versions of the word. Landau chose more than a dozen of them to hang on the wall and placed the rest in a clear Lucite box on the floor, under the diamond-shaped grouping of notebook pages.

Borkovsky told Landau about the little bottles of tears that women would collect in bottles to present to their husbands when they returned from war in the Middle Ages, to show their loyalty. “He’s still doing it,” said Landau. “He said to me, ‘This is my bottle of tears.’”

Some artists in the exhibit have a long relationship with the museum and Landau, such as Christian Boltanski, who first exhibited at the Israel Museum in 1973. His installation is hung over the expanse of one wall of the gallery. It’s a grouping of small portraits, each one set over a small cigar-shaped box with a light, akin to tiny altars. The photos are of Jerusalemites celebrating different moments in life, taken from a photo shop that Boltanski visited during his first show in the museum.

He created this piece in 1989, while working with Landau at the museum as an artist in residence, and gave the work to the museum at the time. For Landau, the photos reminded her of the images of the hostages, their placards hung and posted everywhere.

Just across the way are the bright Gerbera daisies of Anya Gallaccio in “Preserve Beauty,” about 900 fresh flowers set under glass, beginning to droop and disintegrate and decay. These are familiar materials for Gallaccio who often works with flowers and candles, said Landau — materials that shift and change with time.

The massive video installation at the back of the gallery is “Ghardy, Local Voices” by Yehudit Sasportas, whose brother, Avi Sasportas, was the first Israeli victim of Hamas terror in 1989.

They were six siblings, and after her brother Avi was kidnapped and killed it took many years to find his body. Sasportas created a six-screen installation of murky, black-and-white images, while a brother composed the music accompanying the work whose title, “Ghardy,” is an acronym of the siblings’ names.

Time is referred to again and again in “Elegy,” in the form of Jonathan Munch’s digital image of a candle and Melik Ohanian’s clock entitled “Trouble Time(s),” with its minute hand moving rapidly behind a blurred glass, which underscores the distinct feeling that time is running out.

Jessica Steinberg