Three Canadian artists – Paul Curran, Dorothy Zafir, and Marla Buck – are featured in The Day After Yesterday exhibit currently on display at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Through different media – Curran in digital illustration, Zafir in photography, and Buck in ceramics and gold-based mixed media – these artists have filled the Embassy walls with a penetrating look into Israel’s post-October 7 national trauma, healing, and resilience.
“Art doesn’t ignore the war,” says curator Fiammetta Martegani. “Art is a healing tool, and during the war it felt urgent to have this kind of tool.”
Art by Paul Curran, on display at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Starting in the Embassy lobby and stretching into the hallway, Paul Curran’s pieces show colorfully detailed, hand-drawn and digital slices of Tel Aviv, the city in which he lives with his wife and two kids and that animates his work. A Vancouver native, Curran moved to Israel in 2018 and shortly after, started Drawing Tel Aviv as a personal creative outlet.
“I took all these different genres I like – old Matchbox-style illustrations, Japanese woodblock prints, cartoons, literally everything – and started jumping around between styles,” he said. What began as a small online portfolio grew (the Drawing Tel Aviv Instagram page now has over 19,000 followers) into an ongoing digital project that blends illustration, architecture enthusiasm, and the story of the city’s rhythms.
Just one day before October 7, Curran had returned from Italy, where he’d been part of an art exhibition at a medieval synagogue. “We were so full of life – Aperol spritzes, beaches, snorkeling, painting Herzl,” he recalled. “We landed home, went to sleep, and woke up to a different world.”
That night, he turned to art. “The only way I knew how to process it was to draw,” he said. His first piece after the attacks depicted a wounded lion holding a sword, “roaring but still strong.” The trauma of October 7 soon surfaced in his work, in pieces depicting hostage posters, soldiers, and acts of remembrance. “One of my neighbours [Eden Yerushalmi, who was kidnapped from the Nova festival and murdered by Hamas in a tunnel almost a year later] was among the hostages who didn’t make it. My work since then has been dedicated to her,” he noted.
Photograph by Dorothy Zafir, part of an art exhibit on display at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv until December, 2025.
On the other side of the wall hangs the photography of Dorothy Zafir, who moved from Toronto to Tel Aviv in 2014, where she now lives with her husband and son. She began the Heart of Tel Aviv series after losing both of her parents just four months apart. After their passing, she began to notice hearts all over the city – spray-painted on peeling walls and lampposts, rising in the foam of a morning cappuccino, stamped on a market T-shirt, even a heart-shaped cloud drifting across the sky, so she started to take pictures of them. “I needed something to hold on to. Photography became my way to heal,” she said.
She explained that after the national trauma of October 7, photography once again became a vessel for healing in the wake of tragedy. Though the Tel Aviv scenes change, the hearts remain constant, signifying a kind of collective pulse, proof that love, beauty, and tenderness can survive the noise of sirens and the heaviness of grief. “Showing these hearts is a metaphor for Israelis – how we operate. It’s love and strength together,” Zafir added.
At the far end of the hallway stands Marla Buck’s sculptural triptych: three towering porcelain and mixed-media panels in black, white, gold, and ash tones, each bearing the contour of Israel running through it. The work’s surface is dense with texture: aggressive blotches, scrawled text in Hebrew and English, scratches, and fragments of gold and red thread that seem to stitch the fractures together.
Buck, a world-class jewelry designer who divides her time between Toronto and Israel, often works in porcelain and gold, using the shimmer of metal to evoke kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. “When October 7 happened, I felt completely broken,” she said. “Splintered. I didn’t even have words for it.”
The more you look, the more details emerge – tiny white figurines, each representing a hostage taken on October 7, along with prayers, traces of figures, and flame-like forms. “Since October 7, my focus has been on creating things that help people process the trauma: PTSD recovery, hostage family support, things that connect to healing,” Buck said. Remarking on the welcomed development of the remaining living hostages coming home, Buck says that Israel can begin to mend. “We have to move into hope,” she added.
For curator Fiammetta Martegani, that shared impulse toward healing was the starting point. “I think art should be the space where artists can express themselves, heal themselves, and let whoever is coming to see their art heal as well,” she said. “We went through so much hate, so much grief that my vision was to deliver a positive message.”
Each of the three artists, she explained, approaches the same story through a different medium – digital illustration, photography, porcelain – but together they speak in a shared vocabulary of pain and healing. “It’s not about forgetting,” Martegani added. “It’s about transforming pain into something that keeps us alive.”
The exhibition is at the embassy until the end of December. To visit, email [email protected]****
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