Gaston Zvi Ickowicz: 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 is the field to which the participants of the "Nova" nature party fled once the "Red Color" alerts began at 6:29 AM, marking the start of the murderous attack during which over 1,200 people were killed and 251 were abducted to the Gaza Strip, as of this writing, many of them are still there. and as of this writing are still being held hostage there. Ickowicz turns 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. However, rather than documenting the violent and destructive nature of the local political struggle, his work addresses the repercussions of these conflicts on the landscape. He practices “landscape photography,” a seemingly descriptive and objective form of expression whose images gain political meaning precisely from what is absent from them. The strength of Ickowicz’s works thus lies not in what we see inside the picture frame but in what remains outside the spatial and temporal framework.

It is this artistic strategy that he applies to the wounded space left by the events of October 7. Unlike the brutal and psychologically overwhelming sequence of images disseminated and etched in Israeli consciousness through news channels and social media, Ickowicz’s gaze is slow, pausing as it moves, 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.

Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, West to East, 2023, Inkjet print, 160×200

​Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Hideout, 2023–24, Inkjet print, 68.5×80