Building a yearly sukkah with my grandfather was the highlight of my childhood. For the past six years, I have honored the holiday and his legacy by creating large-scale artworks that explore the sukkah as a medium—each installation, meticulously researched, and uniquely conceived. Collectively known as The Sukkah Project, this year's sukkah, installed at the Skirball Cultural Center, continues this project with a blend of natural beauty and historical reverence.

This year’s installation combines a monumental burnt wood sculpture with a living garden, symbolizing renewal and rebirth after a tumultuous year of conflict. The scorched planks that form the sukkah create a poignant connection to the tragic events of October 7, which took place at the end of the sukkot holiday last year. Some of the wood used in this installation was recovered from the homes of families in Kibbutz Beeri and Kibbutz Nirim, embedding the sukkah with a profound sense of loss, resilience, and remembrance. The choice of material also highlights the environmental damage caused by the war, including tens of thousands of acres of burnt forests as a result of rocket and missile fire. 

The juxtaposition of the burnt wood structure blooming from within living plants is connected to two significant moments in my life. As a teenager visiting Auschwitz, I was struck by the jarring natural beauty in a place that represents the worst atrocities of human history. Similarly, while visiting Kibbutz Beeri shortly after October 7, I experienced a sense of déjà vu, noticing the beautiful trees, butterflies, birds, and flowers blooming in the immediate vicinity of the catastrophe. This poignant contrast highlights the resilience of nature amidst destruction, and its ability to teach us about resilience and universality.

The sukkah is engraved with Jewish elegies traditionally sung on Tisha B'Av, the holiday that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, among other calamities in Jewish history. This intervention draws a direct line between the historical devastations remembered on Tisha B'Av—which fell this year on my birthday—and the recent destruction witnessed on October 7.

The multi-channel soundscape which envelops the exhibition is woven from recordings I created in Israel this past summer to transport visitors from the northernmost forests of Israel, along streams and beaches,to the country’s southern deserts. While I initially aimed to capture only isolated natural sounds, the intrusion of current events was unavoidable, underscoring the complex reality of life in Israel, and the perennial duality of humans and nature. For instance, while recording bees and rustling leaves in Kibbutz Beeri, the sound of apache helicopter gunfire from nearby Gaza interrupted the serene natural noises. In addition to these recordings, the soundscape incorporates archival recordings from the collection of the National Library of Israel. These recordings originate from different places in the Jewish world, including Iran, the ancestral home of my family.

This installation also pays homage to the Jerusalem River Project, the first conceptual artwork realized in Israel. In 1970, this large-scale work featured recorded sounds of water running through an empty valley in Jerusalem, played from a series of speakers. The Sukkah Project’s soundscape, created through research visits to the Israel Museum, echoes this groundbreaking work by using sound to create an immersive and reflective experience, and creating an indelible link in contemporary Jewish art history. 

— Jonathan York, Artist