Orit Hasson-Walder: A Bird Without a Beak

In her exhibition Bird Without a Beak, Orit Hasson Waldor (born 1962, Haifa) begins from a musical point of departure that is at once familial and cultural. In an interview she conducted with her uncle, Hanoch Hasson—one of the talent scouts at song festivals and a contributor to the shaping of the established modern Hebrew cultural canon—a charged identity and cultural fissure is revealed: while Eastern and Arab music was marginalized in the public cultural sphere, his mother, the artist’s grandmother, would hum in the family space the song “Between the Euphrates and the Tigris,” whose original melody she knew from Syria, her birthplace.

The exhibition presents the song in two versions representing two different periods: the first is multilingual and connected to tradition and the past; the second is contemporary, responding through rap.

The song’s melody was originally performed as a love song in Arabic and Turkish. It was later adapted to words written by Hayim Nahman Bialik, before undergoing a process of treatment and abstraction intended to facilitate its integration into the national song pantheon. This trajectory embodies the mechanism of “rehabilitation” through which Eastern Jewish culture passed on its way to becoming “Israeli.”

In the post–October 7, 2023 reality, in which Israeli identity is experiencing a deep and fragile rupture, Hasson Waldor looks back and holds on to language and music as a slender thread. In the museum space, Arabic and Turkish are heard alongside Hebrew. The two rivers mentioned in the song, the Euphrates and the Tigris, now reverberate within charged political contexts: they are no longer symbols of longing for the biblical “Promised Land,” but echoes of the conflictual space associated with the slogan “From the river to the sea,” which challenges the possibility of fixing a single, final regional and symbolic meaning.

The exhibition presents two new video works based on the song, offering different musical and visual interpretations whose echoes resonate with one another, alongside silent engravings depicting images from the archive of the Israeli Museum of Song and Chant.

In the performance by singer, cantor, and hazzan Hadas Pal Yarden, the song recovers its Turkish and Arab depths. The video was filmed at the Jerusalem Center for Eastern Music, with the participation of Yaniv Ovadia (bağlama), Moti Gabai (percussion), Yaara Be’eri (violin), and Gali Wolfstein (guitar).

By contrast, in the rap work Bird Without a Beak, written by Noa Shabtai in collaboration with the artist and Noa Avron, a contemporary text takes shape in dialogue with the words of Bialik’s poem and the Song of Songs. The work also includes a recording of the uncle humming the song. The video was filmed in a Tel Aviv nightclub with nighttime stage lighting, while Shabtai performs the song, moving between bodily gestures from rap performances and flying movements resembling those of the golden hoopoe, the national bird.

The rap song belongs to the Israeli present and offers a belated continuation of the text Bialik wrote and published more than a century ago.

Looking back through time, toward music and language, is not a nostalgic gesture but a critical and interpretive act that proposes listening anew to what was suppressed, transformed, or internalized. In a reality of rupture and loss, the dismantling and reweaving of musical structures does not aim to mend or repair the fissure completely, but to make it possible to carry and coexist with it—as a complex, open, and continually renewed harmony.

The voice of the migrating bird is absent and present, searching for an origin, for a piece of land on which to land. This space moves between songs of “the old and beautiful Land of Israel” with their political and emotional charge, contemporary rap, Jewish devotional music, and Arab-Turkish songs of love and longing. Without closing itself around the ideal of an “Israeli mosaic,” it leaves room for hesitation, friction, and movement.