Bezalel Alumni and Faculty Win Israel Museum Prizes for 2023–24

Bezalel alumni and faculty Prof. Yehudit Sasportas, Prof. Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, Ella Littwitz and Merav Shemi Perez are the winners of the Israel Museum Prizes for Art and Design for 2023–24. The biennial prizes are awarded to leading artists and designers who excel in their chosen field, in appreciation of their work and contribution to the fields of art and design in Israel.

Prof. Yehudit Sasportas

Winner of the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art

Prof. Yehudit Sasportas is a multidisciplinary artist and senior lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and the Master’s Program in Fine Arts.  From the jury’s reasons: “For almost three decades Yehudit Sasportas has been a powerful presence on the Israeli art scene, thanks to her prolific and complex work, her distinct creative voice, the influence her work has had, and her impact as a teacher of new generations of artists. Her oeuvre reverberates with the tension between a personal statement and a collective context. Although Sasportas’s family story—which includes coming from the country’s periphery as well as experiencing traumatic loss—underlies her work, it is not invoked directly. Instead, there are shards and allusions, fragments that flicker and emerge out of an all-encompassing artistic practice that dives into the depths of the unconscious. In times of war, disaster, and anguish, when uncertainty and fear lie just below the thin layer separating us from the abyss, the work of Yehudit Sasportas shines a spotlight on the danger, but also allows us to carefully traverse that thin layer, mindful of the light beyond and the hope that is kindled by creativity.”

Prof. Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim

Winner of the Jacob Pins Award for an Israeli Printmaking Artist

Prof. Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim is a multi-sensory artist, a graduate and lecturer in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design. From the jury’s reasons: Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim creates in a wide range of media: installation, performance, video, photography, sound, poetry, painting—and printmaking, which has always played a significant role in her artistic and literary work. Prints are integrated into her oeuvre as autonomous entities and also as part of her artist’s books. Lulu Lin addresses the subject of body image in unusual, provocative, and visceral ways. Her unique visual and verbal language is a hybrid of material and expression, reality and the surreal. In her works, she employs an original typeface that she invented, based on her handwriting and on the transgressing of grammatical rules and conventions. With this font she creates words, sentences, and visual and poetic images that raise painful personal and political questions.”

Ella Littwitz

Winner of the Beatrice S. Kolliner Award for a Young Israeli Artist

Ella Littwitz is a multidisciplinary artist and a graduate of the Department of Photography. From the jury’s reasons: “In recent years Ella Littwitz has emerged as one of Israel’s most fascinating and multifaceted artists. Her profound research-based works usually take the form of sculptural installations in a rich array of techniques and unusual materials, both natural and artificial, and featuring objets trouvés and readymades, photography, video, and sound. She engages with the landscape and addresses geopolitical issues, and raises fundamental questions about the boundaries of the artistic act. Littwitz probes not only the meaning of her objects, but also the meaning of their relocation to the artistic space of a gallery or museum. In this subtle way, she touches on a key feature of 20th-century art—the readymade—and on acute questions concerning our charged region.”

Merav Shemi Perez

Winner of the Sandberg Grant for Research and Development in the Fields of Design and Architecture

Merav Shemi Perez is a designer and a graduate of the Department of Visual Communication. From the jury’s reasons: “Merav Shemi Perez’s research proposal uses augmented reality tools to create commemoration spaces in communities in the Gaza Envelope. Shemi Perez suggests employing a ‘collaborative design’ model to gather, sort, edit, and select materials and testimonies from that day and its aftermath, in order to create an ‘experiential product’ that will be sensitive to the needs and desires of the community that was injured in the attacks of October 7. She sees the process of working with the community as part of the process of personal and collective healing. The augmented reality program, which will comprise several layers and complex visual, sound, and textual content, can offer a type of commemoration that is ‘democratic’: it does not force itself on the individual or the community, but rather is guided by the user’s wishes at every point, adjusting itself to their chosen level of exposure. A suitable design language will be chosen for the digital interface, as layers of memory—an absent-present testimony—are superimposed on a physical reality going through rehabilitation.”