Yasha Rozov is a founder and artistic director of the Night Light Festival and an artistic director of Southern Lights festival, Beer Sheba. He is co-founder “The Refinery”– Artist’s collective Newe Shaanan; Active in “Hamerkazit” group at the old central bus station; Artistic Director of “The Jewish Salons” – pluralistic Jewish identity through culture and the arts; Design lecturer at Shenkar, HIT, U.J.E.P Czech Republic. Initiator of a few International participatory art & design projects. Prizes & Scholarships: 3 years in a row (2014-16), 40,000 NIS from Ministry of Education for Courses engaging art & design students with under privelaged communities. Grantee of Artist in the community program of the Ministry of culture and sport. Winner Tel Aviv municipality and Bloomberg foundation ‘Streetwise’ grant and seed funding (150,000 NIS) for municipal gallery initiative in New Shaanan neighborhood.
The Site is the Message: Visual Literacy and the Specificity of Site
How can consciousness of space and site, from screen to classroom and even public space, evoke a path to Visual Literacy – its understanding, role and future? There seems to be an inverse relationship between the endless imagery we are exposed to both online and in public space, and what eventually manifests as an abysmal level of visual literacy amongst the denizens of the society and their interpretation of said signs. What is the importance of VL? What kind of literacy do we hope to foster, and to what ends? The ability to make informed decisions? The capacity to describe or depict reality through a visual medium – thus opening up different possibilities of interpretation afforded to us by the qualitative rather than the quantitative? Employing a medium based methodology for investigation and representation rather than using the traditional, linear, verbal one? In my short talk I will discuss the importance of visual literacy as an end product of an intellectually rigorous process comprising of text based research, sketching and drawing, and using technology, critical group think and discussion. Through the prism of my practice as a design educator and an artistic director of cultural events, I will look at the current contexts of the efficacy of visual literacy and where we may expect it – be it in a technologically infused screen-based environment or enhanced by site-specific contexts in the physical world. I will demonstrate this by sharing a few student projects from the Holon Institute of Technology, the Shenkar College of Design and Engineering, the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design (Jerusalem), FAD JEPU Ústí nad Labem (CR), and other European schools which I have been engaged with as a guest lecturer, and also via site-specific art I have curated and produced together with contemporary Israeli artists and designers. I will share the process these students and artists have undergone: notions of representation, concepts, politics and culture.