It is beautiful and terrible.

It is the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, now in Culver City, California, (on the Westside of Los Angeles) through October 8. More details are available at www.novaexhibition.com.

The Exhibition provides a hallucinatory, sobering in-depth remembrance of the brutal massacre at The Nova Music Festival on October 7th, 2023. The installation sets out to recreate a music festival dedicated to peace and love, savagely cut short by a terrorist attack.

The Nova Festival was a rave and new wave dance festival held in Southern Israel. The crowd danced through the night. As the sun came up at 6:29AM on October 7, the event was assaulted by hundreds of terrorists who hunted and attacked thousands of festivalgoers.

The Nova Exhibition will be a shock to your system and a restart to your soul. Beautiful young people who came to the site to dance were instead kidnapped, raped and murdered. Their possessions, their memories and their spirit were left behind and curated into a graphic work that grabs you and won’t let you go.

The 50,000 square foot warehouse space is packed with artifacts of terror, murder, tragedy—and yes, hope. One of the most moving images in the exhibition is that of surviving members of the Nova Tribe vowing, “We will dance again.”

Sadly, music festivals attended by young travelers have been attacked before. The Bataclan attack on a concert in Paris killed 130 in 2015. The bombing of the Manchester, England Ariana Grande show in 2017 killed 22. And a solo shooter attacked the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival on October 1, 2017, killing 60 and wounding hundreds more.

The Nova Music Festival attack was on an entirely different scale. While 3,500 festival goers survived the brutal attacks, terrorists killed 405 people and kidnapped 45 other, igniting a war that still rages. Tragically, six young people who attended the Nova Festival were murdered by their captors on August 29 or 30 after 11 months of brutality. One of the murdered captives was a 23-year-old American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, mourned by many.

Yet the story of the doomed festival is told with dignity and grace. Nova is recreated on video screens, in photos, text, and with artifacts of ordinary life. As you walk though, you can pick up one of the smartphones scattered throughout the exhibit, each with a story of the attack.

The tents, iPhones, beach chairs, coolers and blankets of the festivalgoers were donated to the exhibition. So too were the burned cars, set afire with their owners in them. The bar at the festival was rebuilt with empty bottles on it, not far from the portable toilets pierced with bullet holes.

After one’s timed ticket entry, one slowly walks through room after room of a ghostly festival, where the objects mutely tell the story for their owners who cannot. Open tents, campgrounds with chairs and blankets and videos of dancing Nova Tribe people give way to images of people running and screaming for their lives. The bodies of the runners and the faces of the dead are blurred, but their fate is clear from the hulks of the burned cars.

The exhibition originated in Tel Aviv and moved to New York earlier this year. Somehow the show excited the rage of a mob who lit flares and smoke bombs and briefly trapped opening day viewers. But that didn’t stop more than 100,000 New Yorkers, who lined up to see the Nova Exhibition, honor the dead and bear witness to the largest terror attack ever perpetrated at a live music celebration.

Security is tight in Los Angeles, but the show has been safe for visitors. Ticket prices start at just $8.00 plus a $1.30 reservation fee, with the idea being to make it as accessible to as many as possible.

The current show was mounted in in Los Angeles with the assistance of Hollywood partners like Scooter Braun, Joe Teplow and Josh Kadden. Variety noted, “Security was the most expensive line item on the Nova L.A. budget, Kadden says, and was funded by donations.”

Security and terrorism are on the minds of many live event producers. In addition to the protestors at the New York Nova exhibition, Taylor Swift recently had to cancel three Vienna performances due to a terror plot broken up by Austrian authorities.

Braun, former manager to Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, told Variety, “Music brings us together. It is not a tool that divides us. We must acknowledge the victims of Nova as a way to help us see each other’s humanity. Our hope is that opening in L.A. gives an opportunity for people of all views and communities to come together as one.”

It would be a shame to let fears of terrorism stop travelers from seeing this important exhibition. My family attended early in the show’s run, when Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Israeli actress and author Noa Tisby spoke, and the exhibit seemed quite secure.

Photographs commemorate the dead, and there is a space to offer condolences. Survivors tell their stories in video and talk about healing. But while the exhibit is somber, the Millennials and GenZ who number the Nova Tribe, wounded in body and spirit, are already starting to dance again.

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition is located at 8631 Hayden Place, Culver City CA, 90232. It will run through October 8, 2024.

According to the website, “The Exhibition is recommended for ages 16+ due to the sensitive and graphic nature of some of the content. This exhibition includes gunshots, shouts, flickering lights, complex and difficult content to watch, and survivors’ testimonies. Bodies are blurred. Entry to the exhibition is at the visitor’s discretion. The production has no responsibility for mental injury of any kind.”

The exhibit is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM and from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM Friday. It is closed Mondays, except Monday October 7th.

Tickets start at $8 plus a $1.30 reservation fee. All tickets include general admission to the exhibition grounds plus donation to the Nova healing journey for survivors’ therapy. More information on how to visit the Nova Festival Exhibition is here.