Floral tributes laid at Australia’s Bondi Beach after the deadly terrorist attack at a community Hanukkah celebration on 14 December have been retrieved and will form the basis of an artwork at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
The Jewish Australian artist Nina Sanadze, who was born in Georgia in the former USSR and lives in Melbourne, is working with volunteers to process a large truck-full of the flowers in a Sydney warehouse.
Despite their large number, the flowers being dried under whirring ceiling fans are only a quarter to a third of what a grieving public placed at the site of the attack, during which 15 people, including a 10-year-old child, were killed, and many more were injured. Police shot dead the older of two alleged gunmen, Sajid Akram, at the scene, while his son, Naveed Akram, was wounded and remains in custody on multiple charges.
Sanadze said she would finish processing the tribute flowers before contemplating how to turn them into an artwork. She is already experimenting with setting petals in clear resin, and is looking at creating furniture out of composted stems and leaves. Some of the flowers could even be cast in bronze.
Her wish is that part of the artwork is descriptive, perhaps showing beachgoers fleeing when the shooting began. “I guess that is what art always tries to do—to do something that lasts for centuries and keeps the memory,” the artist said.
One of the volunteers working to sort the petals for Sanadze’s work told The Art Newspaper that the Jewish community was “functioning on autopilot, just trying to keep busy”.
Antisemitism has risen sharply in Australia since Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, and Sanadze is no stranger to the bitter divisions the deadly event provoked. “The abuse and harassment of Jewish creatives like me began instantly,” she wrote in a column in The Australian newspaper in January last year.
Sanadze established Goldstone Gallery in suburban Melbourne in February 2025. It opened with a photographic exhibition focused on the life of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
However, the artist has since temporarily shut her space because she cannot guarantee the safety of staff or visitors. Like many other Jewish Australians, the artist said it feels like she has “a target on the back”.
Other tribute items left at the massacre site have also been collected and will be used in other art projects
Tributes at Bondi Beach on 15 December 2025. Courtesy of The Sydney Jewish Museum
Sydney Jewish Museum is currently closed for a redevelopment and expansion project, but Sanadze’s new floral artwork will form a special exhibition when the museum reopens in 2027.
Shannon Biederman, the museum’s senior curator, said the collection of the flowers from outside Bondi Pavilion began on 22 December at 5am. “My arms were yellow from pollen,” she recalled.
Plush toys, pebbles of remembrance, flags and other tribute items left at the massacre site were also collected and will be used in other art projects.
“Many artists have reached out,” Biederman said. “We saved every little stone, every candle, in the thought that maybe someone could create something meaningful out of this.”
