From ruins, regrowth: Artists answer October 7 with humanity

An exhibition at the Bible Lands Museum, born of a Jerusalem Biennale open call, gathers artists who had to find their way back to the studio after the massacre, and asks whether a people, like a tree, can grow again.

Six artists have contributed their own views of life, death and humanity to mark the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre. Curated by Yael Boverman-Attas, the exhibition "As Humankind," which opened to the public on September 24, has brought life back to the Bible Lands Museum's garden in Jerusalem.

In the weeks after October 7, some of the artists now showing in the garden could not make anything at all.

"It just shut your mouth," Galit Shvo, one of the featured artists, told The Jerusalem Post. "I couldn't work."

The exhibition took shape during the Israel-Hamas War, when Dr. Risa Levitt, the museum's executive director and acting chief curator, approached Boverman-Attas, an artist, designer, curator and researcher, with a vision for a show in its garden, "which is so beautiful," the curator told the Post. A call for works for the Jerusalem Biennale followed. Boverman-Attas gathered a group of artists, applied, and was accepted.

"Since then, it was a kind of journey that we went through," the curator said. "I think the war actually brought a new way to look at art."

Some of the pieces were made years before the war and are now being seen from a new perspective, while others were built on site. According to the curator, a single idea connects them.

"In every piece of art that I chose for this exhibition, I could see the growth," she said. "We were searching for an optimistic message. We were searching for hope, and we were searching for regrowth."

The title "As Humankind" comes from a poem and a verse in Deuteronomy that compares humankind to a tree, a comparison that holds "in many senses," Boverman-Attas said. "One of them is their ability to grow, to regrow after the disaster," she told the Post.

Trees cut from a single plate

Shvo's folded iron trees stand among the garden's plantings. The series grew out of four years of sketches and a fascination with branching.

"It's a process that started four years ago, in all kinds of sketches, and my interest in bifurcation and splitting," Shvo told the Post. "It's an algorithm that is mutual to trees, to growth, and also to a nuclear explosion, a chain reaction."

Asked what about October 7 had inspired the work, Shvo pushed back on the premise. "They didn't inspire me," she said. "The only thing I could do was work with children."

With the help of volunteers, Shvo cut small trees that the children folded, painted, and wrote on, "especially kids that were away from home." Only months later, when invitations to exhibit arrived, did she return to the studio and begin creating "other variations of splitting, of growing algorithms."

"It really took me a lot of time to find myself again in this horrible situation and start working," Shvo said.

Four rooms, a broken heart

Tel Aviv artist Sharon Pazner, a trained architect, built the exhibition's largest ruin out of the wreckage of her own studio.

The piece, Four Rooms, began with the footage of destroyed homes that emerged after October 7. "I thought I'd make a piece called Four Rooms, like the four rooms of our heart," she told the Post. "Like a broken heart and a broken house."

The material came from a crisis of faith in her own work. "I was so traumatized, as we all were, but I was thinking that to be an artist after such a tragedy was kind of absurd," she said. "It was kind of depressing, because I thought I could never create again."

Each brick in Four Rooms was cast individually in fresh concrete and embedded with fragments of earlier works she had come to see as irrelevant, along with small objects she had cast in her studio and pieces of broken industrial blocks.

"To overcome the pain and the feeling of art being irrelevant, first of all, I had to make my art relevant," Pazner told the Post. "My art couldn't be the same after the 7th of October."

For Boverman-Attas, the work reads as an archaeological site. The four-room plan echoes an ancient Israelite building form, while the bricks hold fragments of dolls and objects linked to Pazner's activism during the war. "If you take a very close look, it seems like they're all kind of crashed into the ruins," the curator said. "She's asking us to feel and to look at the details."

Reaching for the apple

Not every work in the garden was made in response to the war. Eva Avidar's figure straining toward an apple on a tree was made about a decade ago, as the artist tried to come to terms with "my new body, the new me."

The sculpture captures a single instant of desire. "I wanted to feel this extreme pleasure of sweetness in the mouth," Avidar told the Post, describing the moment when "the tree that was holding the apple disappears, and only the essence of the bite is the experience."

The curator saw something else in it after October 7. "I felt that she's really talking about the war, about how we all ache, how we all feel the pain and how we are all trying to achieve the fruit of Eden," Boverman-Attas said.

The figure's pose, she noted, is impossible. "If she bites the apple, it will fall. If she tries to hold it, she will lose her balance. And I felt that this is so much how we feel about the situation, so fragile, so on the edge, and so full of hope to try and make things better."

Relics for a distant future

Gabriel Klasmer, primarily an abstract painter, is showing a figurative sculpture made from an unlikely material: compressed shopping bags, bound with tape and wrapped in cling film.

"Living especially in Israel, you accumulate lots of plastic bags very quickly from all the shops," Klasmer said. "This is a very discarded material. But on the other end of it, it is a very highly sophisticated material."

The work, Klasmer said, touches "a very deep human aspect, but it's also a very political aspect."

Between life and death

Max Epstein carves with archaic tools: axes, knives and fire. For 17 years he has co-run a community animation studio where children and teenagers make films and develop "their own voices."

His newest work here, whose title translates roughly as Roadside, draws on the ancient Greek herm, a roadside marker topped with the head of a god, which the Romans later turned into portraits of a territory's owner.

"For me it was important to create a portrait of a man who is [suffering] from inside, physically and mentally," Epstein told the Post, "and to try to point to the border between the suffering and the silence before, and the silence after death."

"Art has no right to escape from the world," Epstein said. Most of the works in the garden, he added, are dealing with "the current period, which has a lot of pain."

Reflecting on what art means after October 7, Pazner offered an optimistic view. "I see this work as an optimistic work, first of all, because it exists, because I could make art again," she said. "But more importantly, I wanted to show that despite the many losses we have, they're still here with us. We haven't forgotten them, but we must continue."