Nova Exhibition: the normality amid the horror
Everyone who can should visit this exhibition in London, which powerfully juxtaposes the happiness of young people dancing with the carnage that followed on October 7th.
‘Let me tell you about who I was before.’ That’s how Or Levy – an Israeli who spent 491 days as a hostage in Gaza – softly began to speak. I hope that, for those of us who heard him, we hold onto those words in some small way. For when you immerse yourself in such trauma, you are surely meant to walk away somewhat burdened by it.
The Nova Exhibition in London is a deliberately disorienting mess. Belongings recovered from the music festival are strewn across the floor for you to examine. I looked through a notebook filled with the most mundane customer-service surveys, admired a typically found festival ukulele, and noticed a pillow embroidered with the words ‘oh my gawd’. I hadn’t even realised that spelling carried a distinctly Jewish cadence, despite hearing my own Jewish grandmother say it all my life.
I’ve visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial. In each of those places, I immersed myself in suffering silently, but at the Nova Exhibition you are harried by noise. In every corner there’s a phone, a TV screen and a tablet replaying footage from October 7th. Some are quiet, some loud. Panic meets gunfire. ‘Allahu Akbar’ is the one constant. It creates a terrifying approximation of what those final moments must have felt like for the victims.
The loudest video is that of Shani Louk. Her broken, partially naked body is twisted in the back of a pickup truck, with men crouched over her as though guarding a prize. It is impossible not to confront the obscenity of it: how can someone so young, so visibly full of life only hours earlier, be reduced to this? What terrible hatred must exist to drag this pacifist from happiness and laughter to an end met with humiliation and celebration?
I had to rewatch the video a handful of times to confirm what I thought I saw – a boy leaning over her body to spit on her. I found myself asking: would the 18-year-old in Whitechapel who was recently arrested after allegedly shouting, ‘You Jews are gonna get beheaded one by one, you dirty Jews’ have reacted differently if placed in that crowd?
‘Normal’ is how you would describe much of the display at the Nova Exhibition. The dusty chairs and tents reminded me of the same exhausted disorder I experienced on my last day at Reading Festival when I was 16. The men pouring over the border separating Gaza and Israel were dressed in hoodies and trainers, not military garb. Even the ‘Econova Project’ – an initiative to ban single-use plastics at the festival – echoed the fashionable environmental causes that drift through equivalent British festivals.
However, the most devastatingly ‘normal’ part of the Nova Festival was the way it resonated with the Jewish experience. One of the selected quotes read: ‘They shot at us in the car. They turned my brother into a sieve; they left nothing of him. I have nothing to bury… I have nothing to bury.’ One of the great horrors of the Holocaust was not simply that millions of Jews were murdered, but that so many were denied dignity even in death. Entire families vanished into gas chambers and crematoria, leaving behind no grave to visit, no body to mourn over, nothing to bury.
Or Levy described how, during the 491 days he was held hostage, he had no idea if his wife was alive. I thought of my grandmother’s family – trapped in a ghetto in Bulgaria, no idea if my great-grandfather lived after he was taken by soldiers to a concentration camp.
One of the videos explained how a group of festivalgoers hid in the home of a Holocaust survivor. It breaks my heart that those survivors have still never truly been allowed to separate themselves from such suffering – they have instead been reminded of their pain generations later.
It makes me ashamed to be British that Holocaust survivors in the UK no longer wish to live here. What does it tell us when British Jews may visit an exhibition detailing the deaths of hundreds of people in Israel for simply being Jewish, yet travel to the same land, seeking refuge, months later?
This interview with a pro-Palestinian activist on GB News’s Free Speech Nation shows the impact the Nova Exhibition can have. I’d urge everyone, whatever your views on the conflict in Gaza, to visit it with an open mind.
Nova Exhibition London is now open until 5 July. Find out more here.
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