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
Asher Salah is Associate Professor at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in 2011-2012 and in 2014-2015, and at the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies in Jewish Scepticism in 2016-2017 and 2020-2021. His scholarship deals with Jewish literature in early modern Italy, Sephardic studies and Jewish cinema in the Mediterranean area. His publications include a translation into Italian and an analysis of Samuele Romanelli’s Masa‘ Be‘arav (Florence: Giuntina, 2006), La République des Lettres: Rabbins, médecins et écrivains juifs en Italie au XVIIIè (Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2007), L’epistolario di Marco Mortara: un rabbino italiano tra riforma e ortodossia (Florence: Giuntina, 2012), Diari Risorgimentali: due ragazzi ebrei si raccontano (Livorno: Belforte, 2017), and with D. Flesler and M. Friedman, editor of “Genealogies of Sepharad,” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 18 (2020).
