Jerusalem Design Week : East

The 8th edition of Jerusalem Design Week (JDW) kicks off in less than a month, proposing a comprehensive reflection on the many meanings of East. Bringing together over 200 designers and curators from Israel, China, Japan, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey, India, and Belgium, among others, the event will present over 100 new and existing projects. Directed by Chen Gazit and Ran Wolf, with Anat Safran as artistic director and Tal Erez as chief curator, the programming converges at the Hansen House, Center for Design, Media and Technology, with a parallel program running in other locations in the city.

East
From a city which is in itself a junction between East and West, JDW’s 2019 edition tackles the multilayered theme of East. It does so not by rotating the view eastwards from a western vantage point, nor by looking at its past of cultural exchange and political conflict. In fact, it will not look TO the East, but AT the “East”—as a term, a direction, an absolute point of reference, and the set of relative relationships it generates globally. As future, not folklore. As such, JDW attempts, starting with the preconception and ending with the absolute, to diffuse the term through a series of exhibitions, projects, performances and installations, as well as an intense program of events. Through re-digesting the term, we are faced with the question: what is really seen when facing east, and whose east is it?

Programme
JDW takes place in the Hansen House spaces and garden terraces. This year, a radical installation by HQ Architects will shift the building to face the East. The garden terraces welcome a pavilion designed by Daniel Zarhy, Lila Chitiyat and Dafna Kron, acting as a sundial and hosting events exploring tensions between East and West.

Inside the Hansen House, exhibitions look at East from various perspectives. Highlights include the main exhibition Across the East, which examines the lateral movements that define Eastern influence on the West and vice-versa, the placement of the Middle East upon this axis, and the circular direction of the Earth, through new and existing projects from Israel and abroad. Orientation, curated by infographic designer Roni Levit, will display different approaches to depicting earth, illustrated by cartographers or automatically generated by algorithms combined with personal artworks. In Camels in the Air, curators Gilad Reich and Hadas Zemer Ben-Ari create a space of hybrid reality wherein East and West incessantly produce one another.

Club All, curated by Hadas Zucker, transports the viewer to the future as it seems to be developing in present-day China. Ben Chiu, executive director of Taiwan Design Week, showcases Taiwanese contemporary design. The Indianama Project by creative agency Animal presents spectacular animated posters reimagining India’s tourism imagery. The editors of Romanian magazine KAJET feature interactive videos looking at both past and future, a dystopian and utopian Eastern Europe.

The Matchmaker project, led by Daniel Nahmias and Tariq Nassar, now in its third year, will join eight East-Jerusalem designers with local craftspeople to create new works. In collaboration with Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, led by artist and designer Guy Königstein, a group of alumni presents Get Your Sunrise Here, a performative installation in the format of a Sunrise Market, scheduled to operate in the garden terraces.

Additional projects include a new performative drone installation by Japan’s FigLab, exhibitions by five Israeli design academies, installations and performances by Boutique Shawarma, Amir Zobel and Itay Blumenthal, Idan Sidi and Gal Sharir, and Shelly Freeman, among others. Furthermore, three satellite exhibitions will run throughout the Design Week in other venues in Jerusalem, including the Museum of Islamic Art, Hamiklat gallery, and Beit Alliance.

For further details visit jdw.co.il

Vernissage and opening event: Thursday, June 13, 7:30pm

Press contact: pr [​at​] jdw.co.il

The JDW is initiated by the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the Jerusalem Development Authority.