Orit Hasson Walder / Beakless Bird

Curator: Galia Bar Or

In her exhibition Beakless Bird (whose Hebrew title also denotes “Bird of No Origin” or “Rootless Bird”), Orit Hasson Walder (b. 1962, Haifa) departs from a musical point of origin, both familial and cultural. In an interview with her uncle, Hanoch Hasson—an influential music editor and producer, a key talent scout in the Israel Song Festivals, and one of the shapers of the canon of modern Hebrew culture—a charged identity-cultural divide is revealed. While Eastern (Mizrahi) and Arabic music were largely excluded from the public sphere, within the family home Hanoch׳s mother—the artist׳s grandmother—used to hum the song “Between the Tigris and the Euphrates,” whose melody she knew in its original Syrian version, from her country of birth. In the exhibition, the song is heard in two versions, marking two distinct temporal registers: one multilingual and traditional, oriented toward the past; the other—contemporary, responding in the idiom of rap.
Performed as a love song in Arabic and Turkish, the melody was later set to lyrics by Hayim Nahman Bialik and underwent a process of adaptation and abstraction to better integrate into the national canon. This process exemplifies the mechanism of legitimation to which Mizrahi culture was subjected on its path toward becoming “Israeli.” In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, with Israeli identity undergoing a profound rupture and the bond to the place growing increasingly tenuous, Hasson Walder returns to the point of origin, holding onto language and music as if they were a fragile thread, introducing Arabic and Turkish alongside Hebrew in the museum space. The rivers named in the song, the Tigris and the Euphrates, now resonate with charged political frequencies: no longer symbols of longing for the biblical “Promised Land,” but echoes of a conflicted space associated with the slogan “between the river and the sea,” which challenges the very possibility of stabilizing a single, fixed territorial and symbolic meaning.
The exhibition features two new video productions of the song, proposing distinct yet mutually resonant audiovisual interpretations. Presented alongside the videos are etchings, silently rendering archival images from the Israel Song Festivals. In the version performed by vocalist, piyyut artist (liturgical poet), and cantor Hadass Pal-Yarden, the song regains its Turkish and Arabic depths. The video was filmed at the Center for Middle Eastern Classical Music, Jerusalem, with the participation of musicians Yaniv Ovadia (bağlama), Moti Gabay (percussion), Yaara Beeri (kamancheh), and Gali Wolfstein (guitar). In contrast, the rap piece Beakless Bird, written by Noa Shabtai in collaboration with Hasson Walder and Noa Evron, introduces a contemporary text in dialogue with Bialik׳s poem and with the Song of Songs, also incorporating a recording of the artist׳s uncle humming the original melody. Filmed in a Tel Aviv nightclub under stage lighting, the video follows Shabtai performing the song, as she shifts between rap gestures and movements of flight, like those of the golden hoopoe, Israel׳s national bird. The rap song dwells in the Israeli present, offering a belated continuation of Bialik׳s poem written more than a century ago.
This turning back in time to music and language is not a nostalgic gesture but a critical-exegetic act offering renewed listening to that which has been repressed, transformed, or assimilated in a reality marked by rupture and loss. The unraveling and reweaving of the musical strands do not seek mending or seamless healing of the rift, but rather the ability to bear it—as a complex, open, evolving harmony.
The voice of the wandering bird falters and returns, seeking origin, a place in which to land. This space sways between the songs of the “good old Land of Israel” (complete with their political and emotional baggage) and contemporary rap, between Jewish liturgical poetry and Arabic-Turkish songs of love and yearning. Without conforming to the ideal of an “Israeli mosaic,” it leaves an open register of resonance, friction, and movement.