Between Conflict and Canvas: Israeli and Palestinian Art

This course examines the development of Palestinian art over the past five decades and explores its complex relationship with the historical, cultural, and artistic landscape of Israeli art. A significant number of Palestinian artists have received their education in Israeli art academies, a circumstance that has given rise to an inherently ambivalent relationship: on the one hand, they are influenced by the aesthetic language and artistic practices of Israeli art; on the other, they experience exclusion from the ideological and national frameworks that shape it.

The course addresses the dilemmas that accompany Palestinian artists throughout their professional careers, including questions of representation, the selection of exhibition venues, intended audiences, the identities of the scholars and curators who interpret and present their work, and the significance of recognition within Israeli art institutions and exhibition contexts. By examining this reality—characterized by life at the intersection of multiple identities, cultures, and art-world systems—the course investigates the ways in which a distinctive, multilayered artistic language is formed.

The course further explores the Arab and Israeli sources of influence that inform the work of Palestinian artists, while comparing the perspectives of Palestinian and Israeli scholars and curators on these works and on the cultural and political contexts in which they are produced, exhibited, and interpreted.