The Jerusalem Biennale opens its seventh and largest edition Thursday, spanning 21 venues across the city with over 250 Israeli and international artists confronting the collective trauma of October 7 through contemporary art. The seven-week program, running through November 12, offers free entry to most exhibitions and marks the first major cultural reckoning with last year's attack and its aftermath.
This year's theme, De Profundis (From the Depths), takes its name from Psalm 130 and explores memory, spirituality and identity in a society still processing grief and dislocation. Founder and creative director Rami Ozeri described the theme as a catalyst for movement, saying that art creates a passage from the personal and collective subconscious toward expression, connection and light.
Buried Histories and Open Wounds
Yehudit Sasportas will premiere Mishpat Mokesh (A Mined Sentence) on October 12 at the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum. The video and sound installation reflects her exploration of buried histories, trauma and the possibility of transformation and healing. Belu-Simion Fainaru will participate in the central exhibition, Or Chozer (Reflected Light). Hanita Ilan, winner of the 2025 Rappaport Prize, will present a solo exhibition at Hamiffal Gallery.
Or Chozer features 20 artists engaging with Mordecai Ardon's utopian windows, questioning how to sustain a vision of peace amid brokenness. The exhibition's title — Reflected Light — suggests art's capacity to refract pain into something communicable, even redemptive. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Open Wound brings together 14 Israeli and Diaspora artists to explore the borderless reverberations of October 7. The title makes no pretense: the wound isn't closed, and the work doesn't offer easy resolution.
A Communal Prayer in 42 Exhibitions
The Biennale's 42 exhibitions span Jerusalem's cultural landscape, from established museums to independent galleries, each venue contributing to what Ozeri frames as a form of communal prayer reaching for renewal and hope. Alongside the exhibitions, the seven-week program will include gallery discussions, artist and curator talks, guided tours, workshops, performances and special events. These gatherings are meant to give audiences opportunities to engage directly with the artists and ideas behind the artwork.
The scale of this year's Biennale — its largest edition — reflects both the depth of the trauma being processed and the cultural infrastructure available to process it. Jerusalem's art institutions have mobilized to create space for grief, memory and the slow work of meaning-making after catastrophe. Whether that work can bridge the city's deep divides remains an open question, but the attempt itself is significant.
Why This Matters:
The Jerusalem Biennale's focus on October 7 trauma highlights how Israeli society continues to process last year's attack through cultural expression, even as the broader conflict grinds on. Art can't resolve political crises, but it can create spaces for collective grief and reflection that politics often forecloses. The Biennale's emphasis on buried histories and open wounds also raises implicit questions about which traumas get institutional recognition and which remain unprocessed. In a city where collective memory is contested ground, the act of naming trauma publicly is itself a political gesture — one that may open pathways toward empathy, or deepen the sense of separate suffering. The question isn't whether art can heal, but whether it can make room for the kind of honest reckoning that healing requires.