At a time when the return of the hostages has finally brought some relief, while a heavy weight still rests on the heart, artist Ariel Cohen’s exhibition “By the Rivers” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art speaks directly to that space between cautious hope and enduring pain.
Cohen, winner of the 2024 Rappaport Prize for Art in a Time of War, presents a two-channel video installation based on the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” the famous aria from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” one of the works most closely associated with longing, loss and the prayer to return home. In the installation, he duplicates his own image again and again to form a single choir, mourning destruction and singing of yearning. Behind the recurring echo of the voices is a continuous cycle of sunrise and sunset, a metaphor for cycles of grief and hope that return again and again.
The work explores questions of belonging, exile and memory. Against the backdrop of an ongoing war and life lived between sirens and headlines, Cohen broadens the perspective from the personal to the collective, and from the local to the universal. He recreates himself as different figures wearing familiar shirts and symbols: KKL-JNF, Bnei Zion Yeshiva, the Statue of Liberty and Adidas. Together, they form a kind of choir of divided identities trying to sing in unison despite everything.
“By the Rivers” was created from a moment in which art offers room to breathe within a harsh reality. The collective singing, in Hebrew, Italian or silence, becomes a prayer that crosses borders and differences and attempts to mend part of the rupture.
The exhibition, curated by Amit Shamaa for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, will close on January 17, 2026. It is the first of four exhibitions featuring the winners of the Rappaport Prize for the wartime year, artists who dare to look directly at pain and find a voice through which to express it.
