October 7: Atrocity, Antisemitism and Resilience; and Ramak Bamzar: The Body as Revolution
7 October, 2025 – 29 March, 2026
The October 7 exhibition at Goldstone Gallery explores the dramatic transformation of Jewish life in Israel and throughout the diaspora ignited by the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Australia, focuses on three central themes: witnessing atrocity, documenting antisemitism, and exploring resilience. Through this lens, it examines the profound and irreversible impact of that day on millions of Jewish people, both in Israel and beyond.
The first room of the October 7 exhibition features “a gallery within a gallery,” a reconstruction of the White House Gallery on Kibbutz Nir Oz, situated less than 2 kilometres from the Gaza border. On October 7, the population of Nir Oz was 427. The kibbutz was infiltrated by roughly 500 heavily armed Hamas terrorists, as well as Gazan civilians, who murdered 47 residents and abducted 76. Some were murdered in captivity, some were eventually freed during negotiated hostage releases or rescue operations, and many endured hundreds of days in Gaza tunnels in barbaric conditions.
Among those killed were Chaim Peri and Tamar Siman Tov. Peri was an artist and the director of The White House Gallery in Kibbutz Nir Oz, which he founded to showcase Israeli and Arab art side by side and foster peaceful dialogue. Siman Tov was an artist and the gallery curator. They were proactive peace-builders who regularly drove Gazans into Israel to receive life-saving treatment in Israeli hospitals. On October 7, Chaim Peri was taken hostage and killed in captivity in Gaza. His body was eventually recovered and returned to Israel. Tamar Siman Tov was murdered in her home with her husband, three small children and her mother-in-law. In a nine-minute documentary film titled Chaim and Tamar by Danny Ben-Moshe, Chaim Peri’s son, Lior, is interviewed. He says that if his father had returned home alive from Gaza, he would have continued to be devoted to peace because that is who he was. Can the same be said of the hundreds of thousands of anti-Israel protestors who have taken to the streets since October 2023?
In the centre of the wall hangs a large-scale canvas by Israeli artist Daphna Wysokier Dishi, titled Transition, from the artist’s eponymous solo show at the White House Gallery in 2019. Dishi mines the transitory and transformative states between pain and growth, giving visual expression to their link. Through colour planes in smudgy subaquatic hues, she conjures an antechamber to the afterlife where a lifeless body is tenderly prepared for transition by an otherworldly undertaker. Or perhaps Transition is better understood retroactively as the liminal state that existed on October 7, 2023, at 6:28am and the one that was unleashed on the world at 6:29am.
Upstairs, the artist Nina Sanadze – who founded Goldstone Gallery in February 2025 after enduring months of antisemitic harassment and professional exclusion – has reclaimed the charred remains of the chairs of Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, which was firebombed on December 6, 2024. Sanadze’s installation, titled Shiur (2025), is derived from the Hebrew word for “lesson”. In the ultra-orthodox Adass Israel community, the primacy of Torah study is central to daily life from early childhood on. The burnt metal of the chairs, which retain their form but not their function, are piled against the gallery wall, chaotic and sculptural, they form a barricade, a protective defence, as well as referencing the Wailing Wall. In the same room, in stark contrast to the senseless destruction, visitors can sit and watch Danny Ben-Moshe’s 2016 documentary, Strictly Jewish: The Secret World of Adass Israel. It is an affectionate portrait of a community steeped in faith, tradition and humanity. Taken together, the installation and the documentary retell the eternal Jewish story of unity, endurance and evolution in the face of unfathomable hatred.
Sanadze has dedicated a room to the widespread sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women on October 7. Tragically, the sexual abuse was not confined to women or to that terrible day, as shocking testimony continues to emerge from the returned hostages, among them Arbel Yehud, Romi Gonen, Amit Soussana, Ilana Gritzewsky, Dafna Elyakim (15 years old in 2023), Rom Braslavski, Guy Gilboa Dalal and Alon Ohel. Aliza Levi’s 2025 sculpture Each Knot, Fills the Silence is dedicated to the victims of sexual violence. It depicts an abstracted and magnified pelvic bone with commanding presence using strips of cloth to wrap the twisted frame, evoking both wounds and healing. Seeing Levi’s sculpture, it is impossible not to think of Shani Louk. 22 years old, murdered on October 7 whilst fleeing for her life from the Nova Music Festival, her lifeless body was thrown over the back of a pickup truck, taken to Gaza and paraded through the streets where she was spat on to ecstatic cheering. On May 17, 2024, Shani Louk’s body was recovered by the IDF from a Gaza tunnel and finally laid to rest in Israel.
Opposite Aliza Levi’s heart stopping sculpture is a photograph of the No Excuses vigil held in Melbourne in December 2023, the first Australian rally held to break the completely unacceptable silence of women’s organisations. #metoounlessurajew is a grassroots global campaign founded and led by Danielle Ofek in the aftermath of October 7, when hundreds of women were brutally murdered; dozens were raped, gang raped, mutilated and subjected to sexualised torture. 84 were kidnapped and held hostage, including girls. Here’s Bari Weiss from a June 13, 2024, interview with Sheryl Sandberg, who made the harrowing documentary Screams Before Silence about the crimes committed against Israeli women on October 7: “The National Organisation for Women only made a statement two months after the fact—it did not mention Hamas. UN Women—a group whose mission is to create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise their human rights—waited 55 days.” Would these belated, mealy-mouthed acknowledgements have even been made without the unrelenting global campaign waged by Jewish women? “Believe all women” and “No to racism” are among the many empty slogans and inversions of the post-October 7 world. Being the world’s oldest conspiracy theory, antisemitism has consistently remained impervious to reason, as was ignominiously demonstrated on March 17, 2026 by Australian of the Year Grace Tame (2021), herself a survivor of sexual assault. In an ABC Radio interview, Tame said that the widespread sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women by Hamas on October 7 was “propaganda” and had been “debunked”.
In the final room of the exhibition is Tkuma Wall with a Sky of Mourning Stones (2025), a monumental landscape by Nina Sanadze. Composed of three densely packed layers, starting with hundreds of stones like the kind placed on Jewish graves. The stones symbolise Judaism’s eternal and cyclical remembrance of the dead. They also evoke the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. The Western Wall is the largest archaeological remnant of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE, but it has long since become a living, thriving testament to Jewish sovereignty and return. The second layer of Tkuma is made of rusted toy cars, some bent and twisted creating serendipitous flower-like formations that are interspersed with fragments salvaged from the Adass Israel Synagogue firebombing. Together, they evoke the car graveyard that sits off Highway 232 in southern Israel, next to Moshav Tkuma, where over 1,500 cars, motorcycles, and even ambulances are piled up. Burned, crushed, riddled with bullet holes, blasted with anti-tank rounds, they testify to the staggering scale of destruction and human tragedy on October 7. On the bottom layer of Tkuma, spilling out onto the gallery floor are casts of shoes evoking the Shoah, but also the shoes that were found scattered across sites in southern Israel as ravers and kibbutzniks ran for their lives from terrorists. In its totality, Sanadze’s monumental memorial wall, with its visual compression of time, its palette of thick ash, burnt rust and gunmetal grey radiates gravitas. It is reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre and every bit as affecting.
There are two memorial photographic walls across the two exhibitions currently showing at Goldstone Gallery. Opposite Tkuma are 72 photographs and personal stories from among the 378 victims of the Nova Music Festival. The other wall of faces is part of Ramak Bamzar’s The Body as Revolution. Bamzar was born in Tehran and is now based in Melbourne. The title of her exhibition refers to the flesh and blood bodies of the unarmed protestors who time and time again have risen with astonishing courage against the murderous regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most recently in the nationwide January uprising, and in the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, which Bamzar memorialises in her ongoing photographic project, Pro Femina Series (2023- ). The protests were ignited when Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian was arrested for insufficiently covering her hair and was subsequently murdered in custody. Regime thugs used assault rifles, metal pellets and batons on the unarmed women protestors. Many were deliberately disfigured, some shot in the face, and torture and sexual abuse in custody were widespread. Through self-portraits, Bamzar has recreated these injuries to surprisingly gory effect using red sequins, simultaneously reclaiming a quintessential femininity that is forbidden to Iranian women.
Since January 8, 2026, the Islamic Republic has instigated internet blackouts so that the fate of thousands of protesters remains unknown. Some sources inside Iran estimate the death toll may be well over 30,000. The widespread, state-sanctioned massacre of its own citizens and the regime’s stranglehold on communications have reduced human life to nameless, numbered corpses while families in Iran and all over the diaspora desperately await news of loved ones. Bamzar’s wall of photographs is therefore incomplete and ongoing, a gruelling task undertaken to give dignity to the dead, to put names and faces to lives extinguished in the pursuit of freedom.
It is no coincidence that Bamzar’s memorial wall closely echoes that of the Nova festival memorial wall. This deliberate artistic choice is an act of solidarity with the Jewish people. Whether the IRGC in Iran, or Hamas in Gaza, the Islamist ideological justification is the same. It is a totalitarian, dictatorial ideology that cloaks itself in religious dogma, but whose ultimate purpose is perpetuation and propagation by any means necessary. It is widely misunderstood, underestimated and perversely celebrated in the west. After speaking out against the Iranian regime, Bamzar also swiftly found herself marginalised by the artworld. Her exhibition at Goldstone Gallery was added into the programming in early February this year, a real time response to the draconian situation in Iran. This curatorial agility, coupled with a sensitivity to dissident voices that do not fit certain boilerplate narratives within the art world, are hallmarks of the Goldstone Gallery, and Sanadze’s art practice. As for the dearth of western support for the Iranian protestors who are risking their lives for freedom, and have been for decades, Iranian journalist Roohola Ramezani writing in Quillette on February 3, 2026 has this to say: “If a movement isn’t checking the usual boxes of Western identity politics, they tend to view it as confusing, suspicious or even reactionary. Consequently, the Iranian people are showing us, mostly by accident, just how narrow the Western moral imagination has become.” He ends his essay with these words: “In the real world, politics ought to aim for security and prosperity rather than some grand, transcendent ideals. A moral vocabulary that can’t account for this isn’t just incomplete; it has become a wall between us and the truth.”
The bridges referred to in the title of this essay span multiple worlds. There are the bridges that Sanadze continues to build across communities through her pioneering work at Goldstone Gallery. Bridges of peace with the Palestinian community (Peace Building Through the Arts, August 2025); bridges of affinity with the Iranian community (Ramak Bamzar, Feb-March 2026); and bridges of solidarity with the Russian and Chinese dissident communities (Navalny, Feb-March 2025, and Badiucao, August 2025). However, perhaps the most poignant bridge of all is the unrealised project Bridge to Gaza dreamed up by Chaim Peri and Tamar Siman Tov from Kibbutz Nir Oz. These two lifelong peace activists were planning to one day build a two-kilometre bridge stretching from their kibbutz towards Gaza. The day that there will be a reciprocal bridge stretching from Gaza towards Israel is when peace really will have a chance.
The Hasidic luminary Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), who also lived in times of violence and terrible uncertainty, once wrote these deceptively simple words that became a famous song:
Kol ha’olam kulo, gesher tzar me’od, ve hayikar lo le’fached klal.
The whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the most important thing is to have no fear at all.
Ofra Haza - Kol Haolam Kulo – Undated recording of the song featuring the queen Ofra Haza
Kol Haolam Kulo (Live) – Noya Sol & Moti Dror in an unforgettable blues rendition from 2020