The Nova Exhibition Arrives in London |
October 7th 2023 saw Hamas terrorists from Gaza enter Israel to murder 1,200 souls and take a further 250 hostage. At the time of the terrorist attack the Nova Music Festival, a celebration of dance and trance was in full swing just a few miles from the Gaza border.
As the sun rose on that terrible October day, the terrorists swarmed the festival massacring 413 predominantly young people and taking 44 hostages. Many hundreds more were wounded leading to the Nova Festival becoming perhaps the bloodiest of that day’s countless atrocities.
This week the Nova Music Festival Exhibition opened in central London. A remarkable tribute to that day’s victims, the exhibition “06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still”, conceived and curated by artist Reut Feingold, offers a thoughtfully created recreation of aspects of both the festival itself, alongside deeply respectful displays of the day’s unimaginable barbarity.
Arriving at the exhibition, visitors are first ushered into a short movie screening describing the essence of the festival. The joy, happiness and exhilaration as the young people danced the night away is vividly recreated. As the sun rose over the Negev that morning, the carnival was to become carnage and visitors to the exhibition leave the screening room to enter what has been recreated as a typical festival campsite.
Trees and sand make up the room’s landscape, with individuals’ festival pop-up tents amidst the palms, all strewn with the messy mundanity of young people camping out for a couple of days … books, magazines, tubes of toothpaste, a backgammon set…the usual clutter. It’s a brilliant creation, for nestling within these tented collections of discarded personal trivia – all genuine artifacts, recovered from the Nova site – are video displays and mobile phone screens playing looping clips of the day’s violence in actual footage that had been recovered by the IDF from both the terrorists’ Go Pro cameras and the victims’ mobile phones. Within the clips the deceased have been treated with respect, these harrowing rolling extracts being blurred where necessary so as not to identify the victims.
A wall, lit by flickering memorial candles, displays pictures of all the victims – on another wall, images of those taken as hostages. Some of the names are familiar to us from events of the last 2 1/2 years. Above all, it is the sheer number of these beautiful young people, cut down as they danced, that is chilling. And that they were all someone’s child or sibling or parent reminds us all of how fragile and precious their lives were.
Other tableaux in the exhibition tell of the nightmare of that day – burned out car wrecks; an immaculately recreated festival bar, complete with a credit card swipe machine that we are all familiar with, only this one bears a bullet-shattered screen; and tables and tables of the victims’ shoes, sandals and clothes. To the side of the exhibition, a small room documents the rape and sexual torture that the terrorists inflicted that day. The........