Liat Grayver, Yair Kira & Amir Shpilman Are Dagesh Art Award Winners

“What does being Jewish mean today?” was the question posed by the first DAGESH Art Award for young Jewish artists, announced by the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES).

The prize will be awarded to the joint work of visual artist Liat Grayver, product designer Yair Kira, and composer Amir Shpilman, selected by an international jury.

“Open Closed Open” is a poetic, subtle, and complex multimedia installation that serves as a multi-layered metaphor for Jewish identity and raises philosophical questions. Donated by the Friends of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the prize money will fund the creation of the work of art, which will be shown at the Jewish Museum Berlin in the course of the next year.

DAGESH, the art lab of ELES, explores Jewish aspects of art and culture without the programmatic specification “Jewish art.” It provides a creative opening towards plural religious traditions and secular stories, towards an exciting coexistence of Jewish and non-Jewish facets of individual and collective identity, towards different practices of social and political positioning. It’s all about the creative testing and presenting of something new.

As part of the Jewish Future Congress, initiated by the Leo Baeck Foundation and the Senate Department for Culture and Europe with substantial support from the Federal Agency for Political Education.

The Dagesh Art Award will be presented on Wednesday 7 November 2018 at 6 pm in W. M. Blumenthal Academy, Hall Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin.