Academic Courses
In the last twenty years I have worked in a number of academic institutions devising and implementing a range of courses that use creative methodologies for exploring society, culture and the arts. If higher education is to remain relevant it must challenge its common perception as elitist. The courses below outline a set of strategies for creating education that’s accessible to a wider audience. Universities should not be seen as the gate keepers of knowledge but rather as spaces where staff and students work together to create new knowledge. What we learn in university can have an effect can be used to reconsider how society works. Below is a selection of recent courses that outline this position.
Conceptual Seminar
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
In an age of social media where everybody is an author of cultural production, art faces the need to change its notion of singular authorship when contemplating culture. What happens when we consider artistic authorship as shared or unstable? How do we shift our set of values to consider shared and unstable authorship for the cultural artifacts that we hold dear?
Hebrew | English
Art on the Edge
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
This course explores both the geopolitical edges of a terrain as well as the disciplinary edges of cultural production. The course uses intensive forms of pedagogy that blur the boundaries between educator and learner, facilitator and maker, socializer and maker. During the course you will form a community with fellow students and staff in the city of Arad, in the Negev desert, working with local communities, collaborating on production of art. Learning opportunities will not only happen with staff and colleagues but will also take place with collaborative projects with diverse regional communities, including: a community of young artists, the city choir, a group of dancers, the city’s school system, a group of civil activists etc.
Hebrew | English
360 Degrees
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
Access to education is a fundamental principle of any society. This course radically challenges the inherent hierarchies within an academic institution by offering half of the places in a course to non-academic employees of Bezalel. Fee paying students, cleaners, librarians, technicians - all study together. Democratizing the access to academic work forces all participants to consider their roles within a larger institutional framework. While on the course you will be supported in developing your own practice, the course makes visible your own positionality. How might society be different if everyone was given equal access to academic institutions?
Hebrew | English
Expressive Culture: Art and Culture in Contemporary Israel
New York University
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Exploring the way different forms of visual art reflect and shape the understanding of the "Israeli mosaic" while learning about the way the artists and writers internalize, consciously and unconsciously, the complex Israeli reality.
English
art & Activism
Musrara School of Art and Society
The course brings students to face complex issues related to the relationship between the human being, art and the environment in which they operate. Discussing ethical questions of expression, creation and documentation of phenomena the course centers on such pertinent issues such as: belonging, immigration, work, service - through visual materials (movies, websites, blogs, stills and video) and meetings with professionals from different disciplines. At the beginning of the course students will be instructed to create a blog and will feed the bolg with their insights, comments, questions and artwork throughout the course.
Art on the Edge
Sapir Academic Center
The course explores culture in the margins and what happens when it ventures beyond cultural centers. Based on a series of lectures, each exploring a different notion of the marginal, the course creates a plethora of relations with the notion of the margins or the edges: place and non-place; communities of the periphery, ecology without nature; expressions of colonialism in marginal spaces; institutional critique in marginal zones; collectivity and society in remote areas; perseverance of rural societies in the margins, and more.
Hebrew | English
Introduction to Art Education
Sapir Academic Center
This course will introduce the pedagogy of teaching art within primary and secondary education. For most young people experiencing art is within the classroom setting. The course will consider how art my support the academic and creative development of the students and introduce culture and art to a wide audience.
Hebrew | English
Artist and Society
Kibbutzim College
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​The myth of the artist has a number of key tropes. The romantic notion of the artist is one that regards the artist existing in the margins of society. This course reexamines that position and explores the shifting role of artist in society. How and why this mythology was created and to what extent its possible reconsider the role of the artist historically and in contemporary culture. In order to fully address the relationship between artist and society we must unpack historical key tropes of the artist as one who does not engage in society, this includes: gendering genius, expanding authorship, aesthetic relations, revealing myths.
Hebrew
History of Israeli Art
Sapir Academic Center & Kibbutzim College
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History of Israeli Art interrogates the expression of Israeli art from its inception with the practice of artists and artisans of the Jewish diaspora that envisioned a Zionist culture in pre-1948 Israel; continuing with immigrant artists and artisans that melded European and North African traditional cultures with the regional physiognomies of the land and its people and concluding with post-1948 art and its reception in Israel and in the international arena.
Hebrew | English
