A walk-through installation consisting of items retrieved from a music festival would have once sounded like the exclusive domain of nostalgic celebrations of giant counterculture gatherings like Woodstock, Lollapalooza, or Tomorrowland.
Instead, this particular exhibition is designed to capture the mass chaos and intense fear that came with the Nova music festival being attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. On prominent display are items recovered after the attacks that killed a total of 410 people—including 378 attendees along with responders to the attack, like police and paramedics—along with the remnants of burned-out cars, and porta-potties used as hiding places.
The festival stage is also here, reassembled under the same dance floor canopy that was in use when organizers called out the red alert about the attack at sunrise, and a chaotic exodus ensued ahead of what became an unprecedented mass slaughter of festival-goers.
But the Nova story continues on, showing how community has grown around the Israeli gathering—rallying around survivors, bereaved and hostage families, and a world of supporters.
Toronto’s hosting of Oct. 7, 6:29 a.m.: The Moment Music Stood Still comes after stints in Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires, along with American stops in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. What is currently the only planned Canadian installation, which opened on April 23, is scheduled to run until June 8.
What the exhibit displays
The installation’s ‘Kanta’ camping area, complete with hammocks and camp chairs from the festival, includes both large screens and cellphones that show panicked messages and videos that were exchanged between young party-goers and their families during the early moments of the attack, while Hamas-led swarms of militants broke down fences between Gaza and Israel—where they attacked not only Jews but nearly anyone they came across on the morning of Oct. 7.
In another area, the festival bar—where reportedly all but one bar staffer were massacred in the attack—is mounted along with one of many video screens playing the testimonies of survivors: in this case, the staff who hid inside one of the very refrigerators on display.
Video screens throughout the exhibit include one inside a tiny shelter that recreates the ones found on the local Route 232 highway, where many festival-goers hid. A survivor explains in a video how some of the fleeing partiers that hid in the shelters were killed when the militants discovered them.
Of the hundreds who were murdered at or taken hostage from Nova, several Canadians are included in the memorial and hostage tribute spaces that form part of the walk-through.
They include Montreal’s Alexandre Look, who was 33, and Vancouver’s Ben Mizrahi, 22, as well as Tiferet Lapidot and Shir Hana Georgy—all of whom were Canadian citizens killed in the Nova attack.
Two walls of the exhibition are dedicated to the remaining 59 hostages in Gaza, including Canadian-US dual citizen Judih Weinstein Haggai, and to the 43 hostages taken from Nova including the recently freed Romi Gonen, whose cousins in Canada advocated for her release for months following her abduction from the outdoor festival, often called “nature parties” in Israel. (The status of hostages included in the exhibition text is up to date, with the most recent of them released in February.)
What was dubbed ‘Supernova Sukkot Gathering’ had been the latest iteration of ongoing events by the Nova or Tribe of Nova community, and the Oct. 7 weekend festival, which took place near kibbutz Re’im in the Western Negev desert, was also the first event held in collaboration with Universo Parallelo (“parallel universe”), a well-established trance (electronic dance music) festival in Bahia, Brazil.
Music mogul Scooter Braun, who first supported the Nova exhibition in Tel Aviv and then backed bringing the exhibition to the U.S., recently mentioned the exhibition in response to Irish band Kneecap — who projected anti-Israel messages during their performances at Coachella Festival in Indio, California last week, including “Fuck Israel; Free Palestine” after a prior attempt by Coachella, the band says, to censor its political speech.
In a post on social media, Braun shared a response from the Nova exhibition.
“We invite the members of Kneecap to visit the Nova Exhibition in Toronto and experience firsthand the stories of those who were murdered, those who survived, and those who are still being held hostage. Not to shame or silence—but to connect. To witness. To understand,” read the Nova post.
How this got to Toronto
Ottawa consultant Evan Zelikovitz and Toronto music event promoter Jesse Brown of Destiny Events (no relation to the Canadaland podcast publisher of the same name) decided after seeing the exhibition in New York that it needed to come to Canada, and specifically to Toronto. The pair reached out to Nova’s founders to begin discussing the collaboration—citing the city’s large Jewish population and the local rise in antisemitic incidents as reasons to make it a priority.
Tucked into a semi-industrial portion of midtown Toronto, amid kitchen showrooms and other renovation-focused businesses, the exhibition space is housed in what was “an empty 60,000 square foot former furniture store” until less than two weeks ago, according to Zelikovitz. He says six trucks containing exhibition materials were driven up from Miami, where the exhibition’s previous run ended in mid-February.
“This is probably the first forensic evidence exhibit ever. All of the actual things that are in the exhibit are from the actual Nova Festival. It’s evidence of what took place, of belongings, of tents, of burnt-out cars, of shot-up porta-potties… the canopies that they use during their dance parties… all have come directly from the Nova festival.”
Following a video about the festival community’s activities before Oct. 7, visitors are led into a room with video screens, assembled in a room with dirt on the floor, that show moments of horror from the sunrise attack that day (from rifle-slinging Hamas militants on motorcycles to a bulldozer, and attackers on foot, breaching a Gaza fence). An adjacent, wall-sized projection screen shows footage on a loop of festival-goers running, past the bar, away from the attackers.
Workers including production, audio-visual, and electrical crews toiled “around the clock” for two weeks to ensure the Toronto installation “could have the touch that it needed,” said Zelikovitz.
“It has many of the elements [that appeared in other cities’ exhibitions] but it’s just got a different flow and touch to it that makes it additionally special,” he said.
Zelikovitz and Brown voluntarily organized the financial backing from “the generosity of donors in the Toronto community who have stood together to ensure that we can bring this exhibit” to the city, although the exhilaration of the opening comes alongside sadness that it was needed at all.
“I wish we didn’t have to do this, but because we are doing it, it’s enriched my life,” said Zelikovitz. “It’s taught me about the resilience of these people, and how important it is.”
Responding to inevitable critics
While acknowledging that an exhibition that centres Israel might bring negative attention, as the Gaza war goes on, Zelikovitz hopes to attract visitors beyond the Jewish community of Toronto.
For the next six weeks, the Nova exhibition will welcome diverse groups from schools and workplaces, and organizers expect more bookings for daytime tours.
However, local Palestinian solidarity activists say the exhibition should be cancelled, calling it a “weaponized reenactment of grief that elides the structural violence of colonialism and apartheid” in the exhibit’s narrative focus on the festival attack and Hamas-led attackers, as opposed to a critical lens on Israel-Palestine issues that led to the attacks, Israel’s military response on Oct. 7, or the war in Gaza that has followed.
Toronto mayor Olivia Chow, who apologized last fall for not attending the Toronto memorial event for Jewish lives lost on Oct. 7, received some blowback for attending the exhibition preview on the evening April 22.
“The Mayor of Toronto pays an early visit to an exhibit promoting disinformation to manufacture consent for the ongoing Holocaust against Palestine,” wrote Canadian-Palestinian PhD candidate and activist Ghada Sasa in a social media post, while at least one television news report acknowledged an anti-Zionist critic of the installation itself—which featured a quote on the screen shared on social media by outraged Jewish community groups.
Zelikovitz responds that he’s saddened by “people in the world who have formed such a level of hate and intolerance” in promoting opposing narratives around the exhibition.
“This exhibit… is purely for educational opportunities… [the] Nova community is about bringing communities together, so my only hope is that we will continue to work to change hearts and minds, and regardless of what others are doing to try to make this political or anything else… it’s not political, it’s not religious. This is about a music festival and a massacre at a music festival.”
According to Shani Ivgi, a Nova survivor who coordinates the exhibition’s delegations of survivors and bereaved families—and who accompanied parts of The CJN’s tour of the exhibition—the initial Nova installation, in Tel Aviv, grew from an idea that dawned on one of the producers while picking up at the site after Oct. 7.
That festival promoter, as he gathered countless belongings from the Nova site, decided their community needed to show the world what had happened.
On a media tour, Ivgi explained that while much of what’s on display in the walk-through installation was supplied directly by festival-goers, survivors have also retrieved personal effects based on what they encountered.
She says one person taken hostage from the festival, who was later released, Andrei Kozlov from Russia, found a t-shirt he’d worn during Nova at the exhibit in Los Angeles.
In New York and Miami, Ivgi says, other survivors and bereaved family members encountered items belonging to their loved ones that had been recovered from the festival site and added to the exhibition.
“They found their kids’ stuff,” Ivgi said. “Their backpacks, their kids’ shoes… [that belonged to] their kids who had been murdered.”
The stories get personal
Core members of the Nova team numbering in the dozens travel from Israel or the U.S. to produce each installation. Delegations of survivors and bereaved family members are present throughout every exhibition run to speak with guests and share first-hand accounts and hidden details. (Delegations will rotate about every two weeks in Toronto.)
Stories told both in person and via the video screens that illuminate the darkly lit exhibition recount harrowing escapes in cars and fearful hideouts in and around the event site; one organizer drove a carload of festival-goers to an army base, all while bleeding himself from multiple gunshot wounds.
In the ‘Alter’ area, the Nova festival stage contains tributes to its builder, Dror Bahat, and to Matan Lior, the owner of the sound system—a Funktion One audio rig designed for festivals. Both men died in the attacks.
In the middle of that space, near a wooden carving in front of the DJ booth that’s etched with words including “the last stage,” a wheel-like circle of clay, situated beneath another studded with stones and encircled with Hebrew writing, has been constructed using Canadian soil.
The clay circle in the middle of the ‘Alter’ is designed to crack over time, to reinforce the experience of the installation as an evolving one, according to Nova lighting designer Eran Klein, who says it represents “a mixture of mysticism,” in the form of Kabbalah merged with that of Mexican curanderos, in its “prayer for healing.”
“The cracks are actually representing something that’s always going on,” explained Klein. “It’s something in movement… it is not static. So the whole exhibition is not about the moment and that’s it. When you continue to go forward” from the ‘Alter,'” the dance floor portion of the exhibition, “you will see the healing journey, not something static. We’re not stuck in time.”
Another area of the installation—found near an alcove displaying the names and faces of remaining hostages, including those taken from Nova who have been released—features a lost-and-found, with shoes, sunglasses, backpacks, water bottles, and personal items that include Hebrew prayer books.
That area leads into the candle-lit memorial section, with one wall honouring the 410 total attendees and civil responders who died in the attack on the festival. Hand-written cards addressed to Nova attack victims and hostages, contributed during earlier runs of the exhibit, can be found throughout parts of the installation, including several on a long, low, candlelit table in the memorial area. (Cards are also found, for example, on kiosks, in the “market” corner of the exhibition’s camping section.)
After the memorial space, the ‘Return to the Light’ portion includes an area showing what the Nova community has been up to since the attack, with information panels outlining everything from community healing groups and other mental health supports for survivors, to the ‘Nova Heaven’ project installation that appeared last summer at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
The walk-through exhibition’s more brightly-lit spaces include a kind of salon at the end, comprising a café, a boutique, a stage and other spaces for delivering and taking in presentations. In one corner, a long table bears markers and colouring sheets with Nova’s familiar saying of ‘We Will Dance Again,’ and small stones that can be painted.
In an adjoining, quieter space past the salon, a sanctuary with pillows, a gong, and its own sound system provides a calmer ambience, later to include sessions in meditation, breath work, and sound healing, organized in collaboration between the Nova team and locals from Toronto’s healing arts communities.
Sanctuary coordinator Galit McCord, who’s based in Los Angeles, says a pause in this space is a way to acknowledge the weighty aspects of “going through” the exhibition.
“So many emotions that are so hard can come up… in this exhibition, it’s way beyond [an] exhibition that you just walk through and you’re an observer,” said McCord.
“You experience [it] as if we’re taking you to the past, touring to what happened. And then, just before you go out… to your job, to whatever [is] your normal life, it’s just a great way to balance yourself” to take a moment in the sanctuary, she said.
Survivors on the scene
Nova survivors Yuval Vacknin and Noam Gafniel told The CJN they barely left the house for three months after Oct. 7. The couple first walked through the exhibition in New York last May.
“It was tough when we first entered because we saw everything live, but after such a long time, you see everything again, and without any hiding faces,” said Vacknin.
“In some ways, when you go through it as a someone observing… when you walk through the setup here… each one of [us has their] own triggers.”
The exhibition provides another perspective for survivors, says Gafniel—and a special Canadian opportunity for their own healing, as they attended the festival with their Vancouver native friend, Ben Mizrahi.
“Ben came to my kibbutz when he was 18, did Mechina [army prep], and after that he went to the army… and at the beginning, he came, and he was very Canadian in the group of Israelis,” says Gafniel. “And after one year, we told him ‘Ben, you are more Israeli than us,’” he laughed.
“He became the leader, and he was the glue of the friends,” added Vacknin. “And it was amazing to see.”
“It’s a little bit of closure for us,” said Gafniel. “This is his country, the place that he grew up in, a place that he loved… Even if it’s not in Vancouver, and it’s Toronto, it’s the community that knows him, that knows the family.”
Vacknin says community healing groups for Nova survivors have given the couple a space where they’ve felt understood, and less alone, in their post-Oct. 7 lives.
“You feel like you have another family that people know what you’re feeling. They can understand you,” she said.
“We give our testimony and we share our story—and it helps us to heal.”
Ticket sale proceeds from the exhibition, which runs every day except Mondays through June 8, will support the recovery of survivors and bereaved families from the Oct. 7 attack through funding to the Tribe of Nova Foundation.
