Ayelet Zohar

Institution:
Tel Aviv University
Areas of interest : Asian Art and Photography; Japanese Photography
Region: Japan
Dr. Ayelet Zohar is a Lecturer at the Art History Department. She received her PhD from University of London (2007), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford Univesrity (2007-9), and a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution (2011). Dr. Zohar main fields of research are the histoy and theory of phorography, contemporary art and visual culture in Japan.
 
Dr. Zohar has published extensively on issues of camouflage, schizoabnalysis, gender, and war memory in Japanese photography and contemporary art, and has developed her own reading of photography in Japan as an Opaque medium.
 
Dr. Zohar is a transdisciplinary artist and independent curator, and in 2015 her curatorial project entitled “Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed” was on show at the Tel Aviv Universirty Art Gallery.
Courses
EAST 500, HSAR 803
Reflecting Truth: Meiji Photography between Performativity and Representation, Modernity and Empire
Celebrating 150 years since the Meiji Restoration (1868) is an ideal opportunity to look back and ponder the engagement with an alternative history of photography, from a Japanese point of view. Photography arrived in Japan soon after its creation in the UK and France (1839), and first images were created as soon as 1848 in Kagoshima and Nagasaki. We consider the two paths photography developed in Japan, and their intersections: experimental approaches with performative modes of execution (i.e., direct light, opaque image, camera-less photographs, etc.), versus representations of Japan, a method that can be studied through two tracks—the creation of exotic, nonmodern images for the Western, consuming eye; and the documentation of Japan’s rapid modernization and political developments into settlement, nationalism, colonialism, and militarism.

Term: Fall 2018
Day/Time: W 1:30 PM - 3:20 PM