The Jerusalem Biennale opens its seventh and largest edition Thursday, transforming 21 venues across the capital into spaces where Israeli artists confront the collective wound left by October 7. Running through November 12, the event features over 250 Israeli and international artists in 42 exhibitions, most offering free entry.
This year's theme, De Profundis (From the Depths), takes its name from Psalm 130's opening words. It's a framework for exploring memory, spirituality and identity after the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. 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.
Confronting Buried Histories
The 2026 Biennale features several internationally acclaimed Israeli contemporary artists working through trauma in real time. 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. It's a question that resonates differently now than it did before October 7, when the illusion of security through territorial concessions was shattered by Hamas's assault from Gaza.
The Diaspora Connection
At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Open Wound brings together 14 Israeli and Diaspora artists to explore the borderless reverberations of October 7. The exhibition acknowledges what many in the international community prefer to ignore: the attack didn't just traumatize Israelis within the Green Line. It sent shockwaves through Jewish communities worldwide, reminding them that the threat to Israel is existential, not a border dispute.
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, turning the Biennale into a form of communal prayer reaching for renewal and hope.
Art as National Processing
The scale of this year's Biennale reflects something deeper than curatorial ambition. It's a city-wide exercise in processing collective trauma through the one language that transcends politics: art. Jerusalem, a city that's endured terrorism, war and international condemnation for defending itself, is using its cultural institutions to ask what comes after survival. Not whether Israel has the right to exist — that question was answered definitively when citizens fought back on October 7 — but how a society moves forward when its foundational assumptions about peace have been proven catastrophically wrong.
The exhibitions don't offer easy answers. They can't. But they create space for Israelis to reckon with what happened, to process the grief and rage, and to begin imagining what renewal might look like when the international community's preferred solution — territorial concessions to actors who openly seek Israel's destruction — has been exposed as a fantasy.
Why This Matters:
The Jerusalem Biennale's focus on post-October 7 trauma reveals a reality often missing from international coverage: Israel isn't just managing a security crisis, it's processing a civilizational shock. The attack shattered the Israeli left's foundational belief that withdrawal from territory would bring peace — Gaza's transformation into a launching pad for the October 7 massacre proved the opposite. When artists turn to themes of buried histories and broken utopian visions, they're not just making art. They're documenting the collapse of the two-state solution as a viable framework, at least in the near term. The international community can pressure Israel to make concessions, but it can't erase the lived experience of what happened when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. This Biennale is a cultural acknowledgment that security must precede peace, not the other way around — a lesson written in blood that no amount of diplomatic pressure can unwrite.