The course deals with visual arts that were created and performed in Israel since the establishment of the state until today. Israeli art is presented in the course on a chronological continuum focusing on major themes. The chronological perspective will be divided into decades, in which we will discuss the historical events that took place in Israel and their impact on the creative field. In the thematic area, we will present the main issues, occupying the Israeli cultural discourse, such as the Holocaust, wars, social tensions, politics and more. In addition, the course will present the historiographical approaches toward Israeli art, the main museums and the various theories that produce the local discourse. Altogether represent the complexity of the Israeli identity ever since.

This course presents an historical and critical introduction to some of the central concepts that were developed in the Western intellectual tradition (such as truth, mimesis, materialism, subject, ideology, etc). It discusses the relevance of these concepts in different cultural contexts and offers the students the basic conceptual tools required in the practical and theoretical courses of the undergraduate’s curriculum. The course diachronically unfolds following three main periods ( in Foucault’s terminology “epistemes”) in the history of Western thought: the classical period, i.e. the Greco-Roman culture, modernity, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the contemporary, focusing on the critics of modernity at the turn of 20th century. For each one of these periods a synchronic inquiry of the meaning of the main concepts will unfold around four central fields: the ontological – dealing with the nature of being-, the epistemological – dealing with the questions of truth and of knowledge-, the aesthetic, dealing with the arts and the idea of beauty-, the ethical and political - dealing with liberty, responsibility, justice and rights