Artist Film Festival

In this collection, Maya Zack offers a perspective on drawing as both an artistic medium and a source of inspiration for video art. In the selected films, drawing is not merely a tool for documentation, but an independent expressive language that reflects on itself, its process, and the creative forces it embodies. The films trace the act of drawing, reconstruct the motion of the drawing hand, or present new interpretations of well-known works. Through the eye of the camera, the material dimension of drawing is emphasized, revealing a medium often considered fragile as one of deep, dramatic creative power and transformative potential.

Maya Zack is an artist, filmmaker, and senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her works have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and film festivals in Israel and internationally, and are held in prominent public and private collections.

 Image: Hirotoshi Iwasaki, Daughter of Butades, 2024, video, 8:36 min

“Fault ” is a sculptural audiovisual performance in which Nadav Assor creates multi-layered images on an overhead projector, performing various acts of “excavation” directly on its surface. Though the process involves adding rather than removing material, it gradually reveals underlying structures, substances, and memories—both real and imagined. Using a range of techniques, Assor invites the audience to observe the process of visual investigation, as images take shape and dissolve before their eyes.

The performance will be broadcast live to both festival venues from Providence, Rhode Island, creating a sense of shared presence.

Nadav Assor (b. 1979) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island and in Israel. He holds a BFA from the Art Institute at Beit Berl and an MFA in Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), USA. He currently teaches at Connecticut College and serves as Director of the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology. He is an affiliate of the Open Documentary Lab at MIT.
Assor works with installation, performance, video, and sound, creating layered, polyphonic, and embodied audiovisual environments that explore intimacy and connection between individuals and between people and their environments through technological interfaces. His works have been shown internationally in venues dedicated to art, film, documentary video, and experimental music. His video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago.

Daniel Davidovsky (b. 1965, Argentina) is a musician and sound artist who has been living and working in Israel since 1989. Davidovsky specializes in free improvisation and the creation of rich soundscapes using soprano saxophone and electronic instruments. His work is marked by an expressive approach that combines deep exploration of textures and tonal shades, emerging from attentive listening and a dialog with both material and conceptual environments. He has performed at festivals and events in Israel and abroad and collaborates with artists from the fields of music, dance, and visual art.

Between video works that imagine departure and those committed to staying, a poetic space of artistic strategies for coping with a conflict-ridden reality unfolds. Dori Ben Alon examines how Israeli artists use the moving image to return to repressed sites of memory and identity, or to propose an alternative mode of being within the existing space. Through the prism of political imagination, she focuses on the ways in which video art allows viewers to experience things that cannot be experienced in physical reality.

Dori Ben Alon is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation focuses on Israeli video art from the past two decades.

*Image: Shelly Federman, Floating Wall, 2009

A multi-sensory nocturnal dive tracing the pioneers of Israeli video art. The screening will feature rare video works accompanied by a live DJ set by KVINT and a black-and-white cocktail. Throughout the evening, we will journey through the art collection of the Israel Museum and the video archive of the Center for Digital Art in Holon, exploring groundbreaking works by local artists who used emerging technologies as raw material for personal and experimental expression.
Among the works shown are early pieces by Michal Naaman, Buky Schwartz, Michael Drucks, and more.
The films are courtesy of the Israel Museum Collection and the Center for Digital Art Holon Archive.

Image: Buky Schwartz, Video Constructions, 1978, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: Gift of the artist

What do thoughts look like when written onto a moving image, and how can we think through cinema? Through selected films, Ariel Avissar explores these and other questions by engaging in videographic research, an emerging academic-artistic field that treats video editing as a tool for thought, interpretation, and critique. His talk will focus on the integration of text within cinematic imagery, presenting the range of expressive, investigative, and creative possibilities that this combination offers.

Ariel Avissar is a lecturer and media scholar at the School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. In recent years, he has actively promoted videography as an academic practice in Israel and has initiated and participated in various international projects in the field. His works have been published in online academic journals and screened at conferences and festivals worldwide.