At 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, at a trance music festival in southern Israel, about 4,000 ravers and staff were welcoming the sunrise. That was the moment when fighters and civilians from Gaza descended on the grounds as part of a larger attack by the militant group Hamas and others. Within hours, more than 400 from the festival were dead and 44 kidnapped — about one-third of the 1,200 people killed that day and nearly 1 in 5 of the 251 captured, according to Israeli officials.
The final Nova hostage, medic Bar Kuperstein, was only released from captivity last month as part of the ceasefire deal pausing fighting in Gaza that followed the Oct. 7 attacks. Nearly 69,000 Palestinians have died since, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Curators have re-created scenes from the Nova Music Festival’s aftermath at the world-traveling Nova Exhibition (1800 N. Clybourn Ave. in Lincoln Park), now running through Nov. 30. Every item on display, from burned-out cars and bullet-riddled portable toilets to battered folding chairs and discarded cigarettes, was collected by police forensic teams at the scene of the festival and has not been claimed by survivors or families.
Vehicles that were damaged from the day of the attack of the Nova Music Festival in Re’im, South District, Negev in Israel are on display at the Nova Exhibition. Every item on display was collected by police forensic teams at the scene of the festival and has not been claimed by survivors or families.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
A delegation of Nova survivors accompanies visitors to answer questions, tell stories and guide attention. During the media preview on Monday, Nitan Schlezinger spoke proudly of her father Asaf, the head medic at Nova, and bartender Liron Barda, who stayed behind performing first aid together; both were killed. Also on-site was Ido Shalev, whose brother Roei survived the festival but died by suicide shortly after the second anniversary of the attacks.
These person-to-person connections are the most important element for Reut Feingold, the Nova Exhibition’s creator, director and art director. She wants visitors to experience Nova in their kishkes, a Yiddish word meaning “gut.”
“For me, we [Israelis] are still there,” she said of Oct. 7. “It’s very complicated, and that’s why I don’t want [the exhibition] to feel like a visitor center.”
A photo of Asaf Schlezinger, the head medic at the Nova festival, is among the images displayed in the exhibition. A delegation of Nova survivors accompanies visitors, and during the media preview on Monday, Nitan Schlezinger spoke proudly of her father, Asaf — who, along with bartender Liron Barda — stayed behind to perform first aid. Both were killed.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Immersion opens the exhibit, as a short film invites visitors to bask in what the self-described “tribe” of Nova loves about the trance scene. The energy is irresistible, and it lowers one’s guard to the full horror of the attacks. Feingold, not herself a Nova survivor or a raver, took her lead in designing the exhibition from the impromptu memorials that sprang up across Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“I heard [Nova survivors talking about their community, the values, their choice to take responsibility of their community during that day,” she said. “It’s about how we can inspire people by their light. They are my Milky Way.”
Visitors to the Nova Exhibition will explore a dim, hazy space with no set path to direct them. They are encouraged to touch and interact with all the objects, as sound pumps through speakers that once blasted DJ sets in the desert. Screens loop footage taken during the attacks, both by attendees — some hiding in bushes, some running from gunfire, some recording their final goodbyes — and by body cameras worn by the attackers. Some of this footage is shown on recovered phones, lending a haunted intimacy to the walk-through.
Interviews with Nova partygoers, first responders and relatives play alongside vignettes. An approximated bomb shelter — like that from which Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a hostage with Chicago ties, was kidnapped — proves an impossibly small space into which dozens crammed. Video captures attackers tossing live grenades into a similar shelter and the grenades being thrown outside again and detonating. Another area recounts the sexual violence committed against Nova attendees of all genders, documented by The Dinah Project. One screen follows a truck carrying the broken body of 22-year-old German Israeli civilian Shani Louk as onlookers in Gaza spit on her.
Toward the end, visitors reach tables covered with neatly organized personal items: sunglasses, bags, a novelty headband, underwear. There are lines of dusty shoes, some poignantly single. Yet the Nova Exhibition is determined not to sink into tragedy alone. At the end of the dark room comes light: a long wall of photos and biographies of the Nova dead, and a chance for visitors to leave notes in front of them. Beyond is the Healing Room, a space for visitors to decompress and to learn about the mental health programming that supports Nova survivors and the families of the deceased.
The Nova Exhibition has been met with strenuous protest in other cities; some call it “propaganda used to justify the genocide in Palestine.”
Feingold hopes even the skeptics in Chicago will step inside too. Six words on the floor of the Healing Room guide visitors back into the world: hope, recovery, community, support, compassion, strength.
“If someone recognizes himself in those values, he should come and see by himself and feel by himself and meet the Nova people,” she said. This space isn’t political, nor is it for the Jewish community alone, Feingold says, but for all Chicagoans. “I know how busy we are,” she said, “and still, I really ask them to find two hours to come and listen.”
Contributing: Associated Press