Department of Photography
המחלקה לצילום
قسم التصوير الفوتوغرافي
David Adika is a photographer, artist, and Head of the Photography Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem. A senior lecturer in the Department of Photography since 1999, he holds bachelor’s (BFA) and master’s (MFA) degrees from Bezalel.
David Adika’s work focuses on the visual and cultural facets of the local Middle Eastern space as a microcosm that reflects his social and family identity. His photographic corpus contains representations of various still life and portraits, blurring the boundaries between abstract conceptual language and lavish visual accuracy. Adika’s visual research explores intimate yet universal biographies, while the photographs unfold familiar and unfamiliar aspects of everyday life and highlight questions of taste and social status.
Adika has had many solo exhibitions in Israeli and international venues, among them Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Art Museum in Riga, Latvia, Bologna MUSEI, Casa Morandi, Italy, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv. He has won many awards, including the Minister and the Emerging Artist Prizes from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the Jack Nailor Award for Photography. His photographs are included in many collections, such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Casa Morandi in Italy, the Knesset and private collections in Israel and abroad.
He lives in Jaffa and works in Jerusalem
Vanina Saracino is a curator, writer, and lecturer. Her work focuses on man-made environmental breakdown, climate justice, and more-than-human minds, with an emphasis on lens-based and time-based art practices. She is currently co-curating (with Daniela Arriado) the upcoming Screen City Biennial, titled Other Minds (Oslo, 2022) and teaching the seminar ‘More-than-human perspectives and tentacular thinking’ with Prof. Nina Fischer at the department of Art and Media, Universität der Künste (UdK, Berlin) and at MFA Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv). In 2019, she co-curated the Screen City Biennial, Ecologies – Lost, Found and Continued (Stavanger, Norway) and edited the SCB Journal, Vol.2. She is the co-founder of OLHO, a project about contemporary art and cinema initiated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2015–2018). As an independent curator, she has collaborated with Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice), TBA21–Academy, Cinemateca Brasileira (São Paulo), Cinemateca do MAM (Rio de Janeiro), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), The EYE Film Institute (Amsterdam), among others. Saracino has realized residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios (Dublin, 2019), CPR – Curatorial Program for Research (Reykjavik, Tórshavn, Tromsø, Boden, Luleå, Hyrynsalmi, Helsinki, 2018), GENERATOR, 40m cube/EESAB (Rennes, 2018), and was awarded research visiting grants by ProHelvetia (Switzerland, 2018), Goethe-Institut (NYC, 2018), The Danish Art Foundation (Copenhagen, 2018 and 2017) and Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki and Turku, 2019), among others.
Yehudit Sasportas is a senior professor at the department of Fine Art in the BFA and MFA Programs since 94. She works simultaneously in Berlin and Tel Aviv, with a high level of international professional commitment and involvement.
Her work is focused on site-specific installations, which include sculptures, drawings, video and sound works, and call for an intense and overwhelming sensory experience. Her installations have gone through a process of adapting and responding to the architecture of various museum spaces while forming into artworks that present a new way of reading architecture itself, as well as the wider cultural context it was created in. Her sculptural installations deal with a fascinating correspondence taking place between subconscious materials, unspoken and unseen, and the way these layers of information activate conscious areas across the surface.
Sasportas represented Israel in the 2007 Venice Biennial, and has presented more than 17 international solo exhibitions during the last decade, in venues such as: The Archeology of The Unseen, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Wilhelmshaven. Germany, 2020. RIFTS OF ABSENCE, Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, Germany, 2017. HAMAKOM, GL STRAND Kunsthalle, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016. Seven Winters, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 2013. HASIPUR – The Story, Herbert Gerisch Stiftung, Neuemunster, Germany, 2010. The Clearing of the Unseen, DA2 Domus Atrium, Salamanca, Spain, 2009. The Laboratory, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2008. By the River, Matrix 200, the Berkley Museum of Art, San Francisco, USA, 2002. The Carpenter and the Seamstress II, Deitch Projects, New York, USA, 2001.