Before entering the exhibition, on the third floor of the magnificent Jewish Museum building in New York, a sign warns the visitor. In the small room with black walls and floors, Israeli-Ukrainian artist Zoya Cherkassky shows the massacres perpetrated by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, in which one thousand two hundred people died. Produced in the wake of the attacks and exhibited two months later, these images express the urgency. “It’s a kind of psychological reflex, I suppose, she explains by email. VSlike at the start of the war in Ukraine: I made a series of drawings during the first two weeks. When everything falls apart, I draw. »
On October 7, the forty-year-old was at her home in Tel Aviv with Russian friends. One of them told him she had “read in the media that terrorists were going from house to house and killing people”. “I replied: “It’s your fake Russian news! It is not possible !” But we all had to believe the incredible. » The next day, she flew with her 8-year-old daughter and her niece Yasmin to Berlin. “Yasmin fled Ukraine two years ago. We had a feeling of déjà vu. » She herself, born in 1976 in kyiv, emigrated to Israel in 1991. Although she returned home to Tel Aviv, it was in the German capital that she produced the series hanging at the Jewish Museum.
From October, the institution of the Ve Avenue is considering how best to respond to this tragedy. Zoya Cherkassky’s drawings were spotted by a member of the team on Instagram. The brand new director, James Snyder, found them “incredibly moving”. With this exhibition, extended until March 18, the museum inaugurated a series of initiatives around the conflict and the world of art. “Many artists have started to react to October 7 and what happened afterwards, but it seems that we are the first museum, perhaps the only one so far, that is questioning its role in the face of this type of event”, adds James Snyder.
The twelve expressionist images of Zoya Cherkassky cannot leave you indifferent. While some explicitly present scenes of great violence, most express horror without depicting it. This is the case ofOct. 7. 2023, where terror is read in the eyes of the members of a family and in these hands placed on the mouth of a grandmother and that of a newborn baby to avoid being spotted by their attackers. Above their heads, the artist reproduced the same sun eye that Picasso had painted in his famous canvas Guernica, carried out in 1937 to denounce the bombing of the Basque town by Nazi Germany. “It was the first work of art I thought of when I learned about what had happened in the kibbutzim in southern Israel, she says. The cruelty of this massacre made me think of Guernica. »
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