By the Rivers

Solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

The 2024 Rappaport Prize for Art in Times of War exhibition

Curator: Amit Shemma

October 2025

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A two-channel video installation centered around “Va, pensiero”, known also as the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco. The opera recounts the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king who destroyed the First Temple and exiled the Israelites to Babylon. Since it was written in the 19th century, “Va, pensiero” has become a universal melody of longing and national revival, accumulating multiple meanings and interpretations.

Set against a cycle of sunset and sunrise, the artist’s own figure appears in a large-scale video projection: duplicated into a choir, it lip-syncs the chorus in Italian, lamenting and longing for home. The camera shifts between wide angles of the group and close-ups of the individual singers, circling the dramatic scene. The singers’ brick stage is reminiscent of a toppled wall in a no man’s land. Mirrored within the gallery, a brick tribune is installed for viewers to sit on, atop a soft deep-blue carpet. The singing spills over into the adjoining gallery space, where an LED screen hangs from the ceiling, displaying a simultaneous translation of the libretto into Hebrew and Arabic.

In the aftermath of the war in Israel and Gaza, By the Rivers resonates with the uprooting and grief still present across a fractured land, where all people seek to reclaim their lost homeland. The lamenting figures are dressed in makeshift pajamas and worn-out t-shirts, some barefoot, others in slippers, all appear haunted. With faces powdered to a sickly pallor, they express the search for an individual voice as it inevitably sinks into the collective suffering. Singing in unison, the choir becomes a tribune of mourning and prayer, resonating against the grim duality of this place: two languages and two collective memories, each singing its longing – their voices mingling in sorrow and yearning for return. 

 

Based on text by curator Amit Shemma

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