A video installation that gives voice to the women who watched the Gaza border on October 7 – and were not heard – is on view at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art through the end of May.
If you currently walk through a lower-level corridor of the museum, you will find, before you even enter the gallery, a list of names on the wall.
They are the IDF’s female field observers who were killed at the Nahal Oz outpost during Hamas’s October 7 massacre. For some visitors, this will be as far as they get.
Inside the darkened gallery, two large projections filled the room. On the main screen, a young woman spoke directly to the camera against a black background.
She was precise, thoughtful, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating. Behind her, on a second screen further back, another young woman waited.
This is Observation/The Field Observers of the Gaza Sector, a video exhibition by writer-director Talya Lavie that was curated by Tel Aviv Museum of Art chief curator Mira Lapidot.
Ten testimonies were on display. There was no archival footage, no maps, no recreations – just faces. And yet the cumulative effect of an hour in that room was something closer to a reckoning.
The project came from a fiction film still being developed
The project was born from research for a fiction feature film that Lavie is still developing, inspired by the story of the IDF observers.
Best known for Zero Motivation (2014) – the acclaimed debut that brought a darkly comic female perspective to women’s military service and won the Best International Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival – Lavie posted on Facebook in November 2023, asking to meet field observers.
She expected a few responses and was flooded with hundreds. Together with fellow filmmaker Michal Warshai, she began conducting interviews that ran up to three hours each.
“Those encounters were striking and left a very strong impression on me,” Lavie said. “Each meeting felt intense and emotionally charged. I realized that something essential was happening in the room even before any narrative structure could take place.”
From the many women she interviewed, Lavie invited 10 to filmed sessions in Jerusalem. Lapidot saw the resulting single-channel documentary and recognized immediately that it deserved more than a screening room, she said.
“I thought it would be interesting to think about how this can transform into an installation,” Lapidot said. “[I saw] that there could be a meaning to actually seeing this in a gallery rather than an auditorium.”
For Lavie, the museum context was always the right frame. “The museum offers a different kind of attention. Viewers arrive deliberately, they give time, and they encounter the work in space.”
It also, she said, “allows the work to exist outside the rhythm of news and public debate – a space where listening and looking can occur in a different way, particularly when those heard and looked at are those who were often unheard or unseen.”
The key creative decision was to use nothing beyond the speakers’ faces – no cutaway footage and no illustration.
“They carry everything,” Lavie said. The second screen – the installation’s most distinctive element – came from the testimonies themselves.”
“One observer described how shift changes worked: the incoming woman would stand behind the one on duty, both facing the screen, speaking without eye contact, until one rose and the other sat down,” she continued.
Lapidot said she recognized the principle immediately.
“It’s not only the change of shift,” she said. “It’s a change of guard.” To her, the back projection showing the next speaker waiting became an image of transmission – testimony passed from one woman to the next across years of service.
Among the 10 women on screen was Aviv Cohen, 23, who served as a field observer commander at Nahal Oz.
Raised partly in Atlanta before her family returned to Israel, Cohen was drafted in December 2021 and, by a fluke of fate, was home on October 7.
Her sergeant, Shir Eilat, had taken Cohen’s shift for the holiday weekend – and refused pressure to hand it back.
Eilat was killed that morning. “She didn’t even know it, but she saved my life,” Cohen said. “On her birthday, I went to her grave and met her father. He didn’t know it was me she had stepped up for.”
When news of the attack first broke, Cohen’s instinct was not relief but urgency. “I remember thinking, ‘How am I not there? This is what I’ve been practicing for.’”
As the scale of what happened became clear, she returned voluntarily, staying on for four months past her scheduled discharge date.
Some of her own soldiers were among the hostages. “How could I sit at home while they were being taken captive?” Cohen said.
The tension between masculine and feminine spheres
She spoke carefully about the question that shadows the entire exhibition – whether the all-female nature of the observer role contributed to the observers being taken less seriously.
The command room was entirely female; the foundation around it and the chain of command above it were, however, predominantly male.
“You feel the male energy around you,” she said. In her experience, local commanders did listen to the observers’ reports.
“But not much was done about it,” Cohen added. “So that’s where the question comes in: Were they really listening?”
Lavie was equally precise when discussing this point. “I believe that the fact that this role is staffed solely by women contributed to its downgrading and may have led to them being taken less seriously,” she said.
Meanwhile, “the military places enormous power and responsibility on their shoulders – far more than they may be able or could be expected to carry,” Lavie said.
As for the title, she noted that it was a deliberate invocation of Plato’s allegory of the cave.
According to Lavie, “The prolonged presence of the observers in a dimly lit room, facing screens for hours on end, reminded me of Plato’s cave.”
“Like in Plato’s parable, their eyes are focused on projected images, and the question of what is real and what is illusion becomes a matter of life and death,” she continued.
“It’s a parable on so many things – gender roles, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on how we treat those on the other side of the border,” Lapidot added.
“It doesn’t point a finger at anyone in specific, but it suddenly gives [the observers’] experiences a broader implication,” she said.
The responses have been, in Lavie’s words, “deeply moving and varied.” One woman who encountered the installation had herself been an observer on duty at the northern border on October 7.
Her partner brought her to see the exhibition. “It’s the first time I understood that I’m not alone,” she told Lapidot.
For Cohen, the value was plain. “Thank you for making our voice heard,” she said. “I think it’s not something to take for granted.”
The Observation/The Field Observers of the Gaza Sector exhibition’s assistant curator is Amit Shemma. It was produced by Spiro Films.
