Field

In the months following October 7, photographer Gaston Zvi Ickowicz traveled repeatedly to the Gaza Envelope region, positioning his camera in the middle of a field. This was the field where participants of the Nova party fled from Hamas terrorists on that fateful morning, when sirens began blaring at 6:29 am. More than 1,200 people were massacred; 251 were abducted to the Gaza Strip, and as of this writing, many are still being held hostage there. In the field, Ickowicz turned his gaze to the rising sun – the dawn that was supposed to be the high point of the party but instead became the moment when terror engulfed the site. The place and time of the attack are the external points of reference of the exhibition Field, guiding the artist’s gaze at the landscape.

Since the early 2000s Ickowicz has been photographing the Israeli space in all its everyday complexity. Yet rather than documenting the destructive nature of the local political struggle, his work addresses the repercussions of the conflict on the landscape. He practices “landscape photography,” a seemingly objective form of expression that gains political meaning precisely from what is absent from it. It is this artistic strategy that Ickowicz applied to the wounded space left by the events of October 7. Unlike the brutal and psychologically overwhelming sequence of images etched in Israeli consciousness through news channels and social media, Ickowicz’s gaze is slow, measured, almost tranquil. The exhibition presents a “field” that is not only a physical space but also the site of a painful truth retained in the landscape, affording a different viewpoint on internal and external reality.