Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem has appointed artist and scholar Dor Guez as head of the Photography Department effective October 2014. Guez is currently lecturer in History and Theory at Bezalel and a photography and archival researcher affiliated with Tel Aviv University. At the age of 33, Guez will be the youngest department head in the history of the academy.
Dor Guez is an artist, scholar, and founder of the Christian Palestinian Archive. He is considered a critical voice of an emerging generation of artists coming from the Middle East whose practice questions contemporary art’s role in narrating unwritten histories by re-contextualizing visual and written documents of Arab cultures in the Middle East. Founded in 2009, the Christian Palestinian Archive is the first archive devoted to the Christian-Palestinian minority of the Middle East. It contains a growing collection of materials from the first half of the 20th century documenting the personal histories of this community worldwide. His latest research project about archives, Pre-Israeli Orientalism, is due to appear this coming year.
Guez’s work has been featured in over fifteen solo exhibitions worldwide at institutions including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Mosaic Rooms Center for Contemporary Arab Culture, London; The Jewish Museum, New York; Artpace, San Antonio; the Rose Art Museum, Boston; and Petach Tikva Museum. Five of his solo shows were accompanied by catalogues published by Distanz and New England Press. He has participated in many international group exhibitions, among them the biennales of Istanbul, São Paulo, Moscow, Bénin, and Budapest, as well as Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Caixaforum, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, Ljublijana; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and more.
Guez’s appointment marks the Photography Department’s commitment to exploring the cultural and political context of the Middle East, emphasizing the context in which the Jewish and Arab students live and work. A related initiative on the link between artistic practice and research will be a central element of the new curriculum.
About the Photography Department
With over 160 students, the Photography Department at Bezalel Academy is the leading department in the Middle East. It provides a range of tools required to shape a new generation of photographers able to command the diversified fields in which photography exists today. Throughout the four years of study, students develop technical, theoretical and critical skills while embedded in historic and conceptual contexts. The department encourages ongoing exploration of the students’ identity as artists who are aware of and committed to the environment within which they operate. The curriculum introduces the students to the spectrum of the photographic language, exploring questions within the context of their time and place, and demands the development of observation skills capable of distinguishing between object and representation.
About Bezalel Academy
Established in 1906, Bezalel is one of the most prestigious academies of art and design in the world. Bezalel takes enormous pride in its many generations of graduates at the cutting edge of their profession. The Academy’s unique strength lies in its ability to respond swiftly to cultural changes, as demonstrated by the numerous artistic breakthroughs for which it has been responsible. The Academy has a broad and multifaceted scope of professional and artistic activities involving pioneering, state-of-the-art design methods as well as ancient techniques. It offers workshops in a variety of fields that have seen many changes in the past decades: industrial design, architecture, animation & video art, visual communications, fine art, photography, fashion & jewelry, history & theory, and ceramics & glass.
For more information about the new appointment, contact Bezalel’s PR Office: [email protected].
