Back and Forth: An Invitation for an Artistic Collective Reflection on the Layers that Form Israeli Society and Shape its Near Future

In September 2023 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art opened a new exhibition: Kippur – War Requiem by Amos Gitai. 50 years after the Kippur war broke out the exhibition presents the impact the war had on those who participated in it through the eyes and guts of Gitai. It is a painstaking job, plausibly impossible, to follow and identify the ways the Kippur war shaped, and is still shaping, Israeli society, especially when adopting Gitai’s view and experience of war as chaos. Nevertheless, it is solid that the Kippur war has a main role in shaping another prolonged layer of the consciousness of Israeli society, dealing with the traumatic events of a surprise attack, leadership failure and many casualties. As the war and its implications are still being processed, individually and socially, the exhibition focuses on Gitai’s perspective – now, then and in-between. The war pivoted Gitai’s path from architecture to filmmaking. When he heard the sirens cutting the silence of Yom Kippur on the early afternoon of 6 October 1973 Gitai picked up a Super-8 video camera and his friend from the IDF Egoz Unit and drove north to the Golan Heights to look for the war. His voluntary and spontaneous documentation led him to his acclaimed filmmaking career.
Five months before the Kippur war broke out, in May 1973, Sacrifice of Isaac, a sculpture by American Pop artist George Segal was installed and exhibited for the first time in the plaza of Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium. Segal became known in the 1960s for his life-size white plaster sculptures, many of which were displayed in the public sphere. The decision to create sculptures from plaster – a material usually used for molds rather than the final work – exposes them to the ravages of time, indicating their fragility, both physically and metaphorically. In homage to his father and his affinity to the stories of the Bible, Segal chose the story of sacrifice of Isaac as his subject. In the Biblical story God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham begins to comply, having bound Isaac to the alter, he is stopped by the angel of God. A ram appears and is slaughtered in Isaac’s stead, as God commends Abraham’s pious obedience. As the war broke out it inevitably charged the work with political and social meanings: the sons of Abraham are being slaughtered and no ram appears to redeem them and save them from death. The image of the Binding of Isaac became a signifier of the winds of war, related to the families sacrificing their sons in battle. In 1977 the sculpture was donated to Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Modern art collection. When Kippur - War Requiem was planned and curated Ora Lapidot, the Museum’s chief curator, decided to stage the contexts as they were naturally intertwined in history and the sculpture (curated by Tal Broitman) is now located just a wall behind Gitai’s filmed fragments from the war and drawings he created on the same year, after he returned home.