Local Testimony: Witnessing a tragedy in motion

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By BARRY DAVIS JANUARY 12, 2025 12:11

They say that war and destruction, particularly on a grand scale, are the most photogenic of topics. If I had any doubt about that, it was immediately dispelled as I entered this year’s “Local Testimony” exhibition, curated by Anat Saragusti, at the Eretz Israel Museum (Musa) in Ramat Aviv.

Right in front of the entrance to the display area, you come face to face with one of the most dramatic events of Oct. 7 – an outsized print of the abode of Pessi Cohen on Kibbutz Be’eri. The building, what was left of it, is charred and disfigured in the extreme, following the fierce battle between an IDF unit, complete with tank, and the Hamas terrorists who were holding 15 Israelis hostage. All but two of the hostages were killed, either in the exchanges of fire or murdered by Hamas.

A look at the Local Testimony exhibit

Opening the show with Pessi’s House, by Alon Gilboa, which won first place in the Society and Community category, infers an elemental approach to the tragedy, as Gilboa caught five figures searching through the rubble for human remains. There is a strange sense of tranquility to the work, almost like a pall of suspension, as time seems to have frozen in the wake of the brutality. The controversy over the IDF’s handling of the situation is also inferred.

Any marketing creative professional will tell you that some of the best commercials leave things unsaid. That can draw potential consumers into the storyline and hopefully, from the advertiser’s point of view, get us to shell out our hard-earned cash on their “wonderful” product.

The feral subliminal message hits you smack in the face and tugs mercilessly on the heartstrings when you turn around from Pessi’s House and catch a glimpse of Ohad Zwigenberg’s snap of mailboxes at Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Shaylee Atary and her two-month-old daughter, Shaya, were saved from Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza by Shaya’s father, Yahav Winner. He was taken hostage and later murdered. (credit: Oded Wagenstein)

Several dozen of the 100 or so covers have black and/or red stickers on them. The black ones have the word “chatuf” or “chatufa” (kidnapped) on them, and the red ones read “nirtzach” or “nirtzecha” (murdered). Some letterboxes have four labels attached to them. They were placed there, in November 2023, by Natalie Madmon, whose mother, Ofelia Roitman, was abducted to Gaza and later released. The idea of mail not being delivered because the addressee is either dead or being held captive hits hard.

There are plenty of more overt expressions of grief, naturally including mourning and funerals. One in particular stood out, which could be construed, or misconstrued, as conveying humorous undertones of the very darkest ilk.

Gil Cohen-Magen was sufficiently on the ball to snap prostrate bereaved family and friends at the funeral of Tom Godo, who was murdered by Hamas at Kibbutz Kissufim on Oct. 7. As they gathered by the graveside, a rocket attack siren sounded, and all, except the photographer, hit the deck between the graves.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or both,” I told curator Saragusti. “That was tough,” she said. “It is a very powerful moment,” she added. With over four decades of journalistic experience as a writer, editor, and photographer, she would know.

I WONDERED how Saragusti had got on with her curatorial duties. On the one hand, there was such an abundance of dramatic material that she was probably spoiled for choice. Then again, the subject matter is so emotive, she surely needed nerves of steel to work through the entries in the various categories, the vast majority of which address the events and aftermath of Oct. 7.

“It was hard for me, but I felt that it was very meaningful,” she noted. “There is a cliché which posits that media reporting is the first draft of history. We live in a very visual world. When you think of Pessi’s House, the building was demolished, it doesn’t exist anymore. So the photograph documents the terrible story – the hostages, whether the [IDF] tank that fired on the house killed any of the hostages, and the ZAKA [International Rescue Unit] people and archaeologists looking for the remains of the people who were killed there. I felt it was important to have that photograph on the wall, and to choose the pictures that offer the best representation of this tough year, and that it should be adequately varied,” she explained.

Saragusti clearly did her best to get away from Oct. 7, at least in a patently visible manner. “I had to figure out how to create for the visitors some places where they can get some heartwarming sense, too.”

Sports can provide an escapist breather from the seemingly endless doom and gloom, particularly when there are a few triumphs to celebrate. Oz Mualem was in the right place at the right time to capture an uplifting vignette when he caught the Israeli rhythmic gymnastics team jumping for joy in the nanosecond when they realized they’d secured a silver medal at the Olympic Games in Paris last summer.

The same Yediot Aharonot photojournalist snapped Israeli judoka Peter Paltchik expressing his exhilaration at winning a bronze, together with his trainer, former Olympic medalist Oren Smadja. However, even this sliver of happiness is tempered by sadness, as Smadja’s son is one of the many IDF soldiers who have fallen in Gaza.

Returning hostages also provided some respite from the gloom. Amir Cohen’s snap of Aviva Siegel returning from captivity and being jubilantly welcomed by residents of Ofakim in November 2023 strikes a suitable chord.

And there are the odd departures into apparently extraneous climes, such as Miri Nagler’s shot of Thai workers picking scallions at Moshav Bnei Atarot, complete with conical straw hats. In the context of this exhibition, that seems otherworldly, as does the image of a crocodile, by Rabia Basha, just minding its own natural business at the safari park in Ramat Gan.

Curatorial work generally includes addressing contextual logistics – sometimes creating thematic sequences, other times placing artworks so that they feed off each other in a manner that echoes the catchphrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Saragusti has deftly employed that skill in using oxymoronic juxtapositions to up the wow ante. Take, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a clutch of coalition MKs delirious with glee after securing a majority vote in the Knesset for the national budget bill in December 2023. “And that was on a day when seven or eight Israeli soldiers were killed in southern Gaza,” she noted.

The implausible moment, captured by Haaretz photographer Olivier Fitoussi, won the Curator’s Choice award in the Singles section. Tellingly, it sits right alongside Dafna Yosha’s work of a protest march by women calling for the release of female hostages in Gaza. The contrast could not be greater or more poignant.

Incongruity pops up all around the exhibition, often with hefty emotional baggage. One that caught my eye and heart was Dan Bar Dov’s image of Daniel Weiss playing a guitar and singing with a band in the ruins of his parents’ home in Be’eri. The fact that Yehudit and Shmulik Weiss were murdered on Oct. 7 underscores the clear message of the song title, “We Have to Go on Playing Music,” and the barely comprehensible situation.

The entertainment side of life here, while the war drags on, reverberates with references to the tragedy. Many musicians and other artists initially questioned whether they should, or could, continue to create in such dire circumstances. But, as we know, artists and audiences alike realized before long that we all desperately need something to help us rediscover the will to persevere.

Shirly Foox’s monochrome tetraptych of rockers Alon Olearchick, Efrat Gosh, Corinne Allal, and Ehud Banai distills that dichotomy to a tee. Each of the musicians appears meditative, if not downright apprehensive, as they are about to take the stage.

There are more pairings that convey a much more expansive story, such as the twinning of Michael Brikman’s evocative picture of the fire-ravaged Hakerem neighborhood of Kibbutz Be’eri, taken at the end of October 2023, and an overhead view of the decimated Shejaia district of Gaza, photographed a month and a half later.

“I wanted to put things in context,” said the curator. “You have, for example, the politicians [in the Knesset], and you have the funerals on the opposite wall. And there are the aerial shots of Gaza and Be’eri. There is so much destruction there. At the end of the day, if I want people to come away from the exhibition with something, it is the understanding that everyone loses in a war. War is bad for everyone. We see that in a very tangible way in this exhibition – all the destruction, the slaughter. It is very difficult to accommodate that.”

Saragusti said there were many factors she had to get sorted out before she got down to the business of selection and placement.

“There was a group of photographers who got going straightaway on Oct. 7 and hotfooted it to the South. Everything was still out there – the bodies at the Supernova party and the kibbutzim. It was all so fresh. Do you show pictures of bodies? That was a very difficult dilemma. Some of the photographers felt they should be shown, for history, so no one says it didn’t happen.”

Saragusti and the “Local Testimony” jurors did not share that opinion. “We thought we shouldn’t show bodies. It is a strong [emotional] trigger. There are people who would come to the exhibition from the actual families [of the victims], and their friends. And I thought we should respect the dead.”

There were other quandaries. “We weren’t sure if we should show pictures from Gaza, pictures taken by reserve IDF soldiers. They were professional photographers, but they were on reserve duty. In the end, we decided we should show them because it was important to have pictures from inside Gaza, too.”

Saragusti clearly wanted to present us with as balanced an overview as possible of Oct. 7 and its painful ongoing aftermath. “We didn’t receive any photos from the Palestinians,” she noted somewhat superfluously. “They don’t send pictures to Israeli institutions. We tried to check that out with news agencies – AP and Reuters – but the Palestinians didn’t agree to collaborate with an Israeli museum. There were lots of dilemmas involved.”

THERE IS everything in this “Local Testimony” exhibition, even without the usual contingent of press photos from abroad. There is abject misery, quintessential joy, the prosaic and the absurd, and then some. The stirring impact of the rollout is amplified by the inescapable fact that we are still bogged down in a terrifying morass of regional violence, very close to home, the rising death toll of our soldiers, dozens of Israeli hostages still undergoing unimaginable suffering, and pain and suffering on all sides.

“I have been going through this process, looking at the photos, for months now,” Saragusti said. “My senses began to dull after a while. But when I saw the people at the opening, including friends of mine, choked with emotion, I understood this really shakes you. And this is not from a perspective on looking back on something that took place. This is still bleeding.” 

‘Local Testimony’ closes on February 15. For more information: (03) 641-5244 and eretzmuseum.org.il/en/exhibitions.