Nova exhibition commemorates the moment the music stood still at Israeli rave | Canada Voices

At 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, the Tribe of Nova trance music festival in Re’im, Israel was attacked by Hamas. At least 350 people, including four Canadians, were killed. More than 40 others were abducted. The assault was part of a broader surprise attack on Israel that resulted in the continuing war in Gaza.

In a sprawling space in midtown Toronto that once held a furniture store, a touring immersive exhibition memorializes the losses and recreates the rave with grim artifacts salvaged from the grounds. A door to a portable toilet is punctured with bullet holes, automobiles are charred hulks, and horrific cellphone footage of the attack plays on endless loops.

Amidst pup tents, dusty sandals and overturned camp chairs is a backgammon board, interrupted mid-game. And while the subtitle of the Nova Music Festival Exhibition is “The Moment the Music Stood Still,” there have been other such moments.

Earlier this month, police in Brazil arrested two people in connection with an alleged plot to detonate explosives at a free Lady Gaga concert in Rio de Janeiro.

On May 22, 2017, 22 people, including children and teenagers, were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in the aftermath of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.

Later that year, on Oct. 1, a lone shooter firing from a hotel room window killed 60 people attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas.

In Paris, on Nov. 13, 2015, terrorists sprayed bullets into a crowd at the Bataclan theatre during a performance by the rock band Eagles of Death Metal, killing 90 fans.

The circumstances of the attacks vary, but a promoter behind the Nova festival and the subsequent exhibition believes there is a common motivation behind them.

“Their idea is to bring evil to the world,” said Ilan Faktor. “The best way to prove your evilness is to attack where people are the most happy, the most innocent.”

Faktor and others initially mounted the Nova exhibition in Tel Aviv in 2024. It was created and curated by Reut Feingold, who has described it as an “invitation to feel, touch, smell the Nova community.”

Music executive Scooter Braun, who masterminded Justin Bieber’s rise to superstardom and who managed pop singer Grande at the time of the Manchester bombing, visited the exhibit in Israel and was moved enough to help bring it to New York last summer.

“We basically told the story of Nova, and it has nothing to do with politics,” Braun told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “It’s just about massacre at a music festival that should have never happened. Unfortunately, people see religion as politics. But music is a universal language, and music has to remain a safe place.”

After anti-Israel demonstrators gathered at the Nova exhibition site in lower Manhattan, New York Mayor Eric Adams called the protest “despicable.” The exhibition later moved on to Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and Miami.

Toronto dance music producer Jesse Brown visited the exhibition in New York. Emotionally affected, he and others brought the installations to Canada.

“I like to describe myself as an October 8th Jew,” Brown said. “After I saw what happened on October 7th, I felt the need to get involved. I never considered myself an activist.”

Music and politics are not strange bedfellows. Last month at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., the Irish rap group Kneecap expressed anti-Israel sentiments and led a “free Palestine” chant during a performance.

Coachella organizers, including founder Paul Tollett, were criticized for not denouncing the rappers’ actions.

“Some of us think they should have made a statement against it,” said Faktor, a leading figure in the trance music scene in Israel. “But I wouldn’t expect Coachella to be too dramatic about it. Perhaps a low profile is better for them.”

This week, British police charged a member of the Belfast-based Kneecap with a terrorism offence for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in 2024.

A petition was started in Vancouver to call off two Kneecap concerts at the Vogue Theatre in October.

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition provides little in the way of context on the Israel-Hamas conflict. There are no national symbols and the war in Gaza that followed the Oct. 7 attack is not explored. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, with nearly a third of the dead under 18. The Oct. 7 attack by Hamas killed more than 1,200 and 250 were taken hostage.

“It’s not our job to give people a history lesson of what is happening in the world,” Faktor said, explaining the focus on the festival assault. “We know it’s not only our tragedy, but we chose to tell our own story.”

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition runs to June 8, at 1381 Castlefield Ave.