‘The Teddy Bear Saw It All’: Art That Aches Over October 7 Atrocities Stands Witness at the UN

A young girl holds her mother’s hand and asks, “Mom, why?” They stand in a house that looks nothing like a house anymore. Shards of glass cover the floor, walls cave inward, and the ceiling is peeling apart. The destruction is all-consuming.That is the scene of an art piece in the exhibition by the sculptor Orna Ben-Ami, “Negative Positive,” which opened on Tuesday at the United Nations headquarters at New York City. Ms. Ben-Ami welds iron sculptures atop images by a photojournalist, Ziv Koren, to evoke the scale of the suffering inflicted by Hamas on October 7. On a photograph taken on October 15 of a dining table covered in debris, Ms. Ben-Ami places an iron sculpture of a framed family portrait in place of a wedding photo that Hamas had seized from that home. In another piece, a sculpture of a teddy bear sits on a photograph of a baby bed in a room splattered with what looks like dirt and blood. The title of that work is, “The Teddy Bear Saw it All.”Ms. Ben-Ami says that she chose not to include photographs featuring human bodies. Her sculptures fill that void. “Just as the whole world remembers September 11, the world must not forget October 7th, 2023, in Israel as a cruel and brutal event,” she said. “I come to you as an artist and I see as my mission, the expression of all pain in my artistic way.”‘The Teddy Bear Saw It All.’ Photograph by Ziv Koren, sculpture by Ora Ben-Ami. Kfar Aza, October 2023 The exhibit features sculptures Ms. Ben-Ami created years ago that assume a deeper resonance after Hamas’s atrocities in Israel. A cradle covered with thick metal bars now resembles a small coffin. A minimalistic depiction of a dining room table and chairs looks like furniture burnt to its bones. “Israel did not want this war,” its ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said at remarks accompanying the opening. “We did not start this war and no country wants this war to end more than Israel. It is our children, our soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice in Gaza. But we have no choice other than to continue fighting because this is a war for our future.”

‘The Teddy Bear Saw It All’: Art That Aches Over October 7 Atrocities Stands Witness at the UN

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