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
Dr. Gal Hertz is the head of the Visual and Material Culture Department at Bezalel. He is a Germanist and a cultural researcher. His research creates a connection between the history and philosophy of science and cultural studies. He examines the rise of social disciplines around 1900 in the German-speaking world, such as criminology, sociology, sexology, law and psychiatry; This is from an affinity to popular culture, development of the press and media, theater, literature, and art. According to Hertz, the connecting point between seemingly unrelated fields is the establishment of a social order based on a new imagined normative base. Hertz holds a master's degree and a doctorate from the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University, pursued post-doctoral studies at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL Berlin), and taught at both Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. After that he was co-director of the research project "Humanities in Conflict Zones" at the Minerva Humanities center, and served as a research and teaching fellow at the Cohn Institute and the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. In parallel to his work at the university, he is the editor of "MiNituk LeShiluv" (“From Disconnection to Integration”), an academic journal of the Ministry of Education Department for the Education of Children and At-Risk Youth, in which he is also involved in the processes of training teaching staff and in the development and implementation of the department's approach: therapeutic pedagogy.
Mitra Abbaspour is Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Princeton University Art Museum and a member of the University faculty. Prior to Princeton, she served as an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and an Assistant Curator at the California Museum of Photography, in addition to having served as a guest curator for a number of exhibitions at various institutions.
At Princeton, she has curated or co-curated at the Museum include Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2019), Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (2018), Making History Visible: Of American Myths and National Heroes (2017).
At MoMA, she led the curatorial branch of an interdisciplinary research initiative that resulted in the print and digital publications Object : Photo: Modern Photographs 1909-1945. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists in this field, most recently contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, and Shirin Neshat and has also taught courses both in her specialization, the modern and contemporary Middle East and, general area specializations—Islamic art, modern art, and the history of photography—at The Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College.
Prof. Senan Abdelqader is a practicing architect and urban planner, founder and owner of Senan Architects (SA), which he established in 1995 in Herzeliya, in Jerusalem in 2004, and in 2014 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
Through working on numerous private projects and other public ones, that try to influence and are influenced by social and political variables, Senan has created a public platform where the process of planning is considered to be a collective act and a space for civil practices.
During his practice in SA, Senan started teaching at Tel-Aviv University in 1998; he then founded the “in-formal” research unit in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2006, giving the possibility to architecture students to critically experiment a space where formality and informality are tangled
Senan has participated in various local and international architectural Biennales and exhibitions, among which, the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 2007 where he published his book “Architecture of (in)Dependency”, in which he introduces the possibility of transforming the rural life that the Palestinians live, into a contemporary urban life.
In 2018 he established the Institute for the Study of Arab Culture in Visual Arts, Design and Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.
