Israeli protests frame Jerusalem Design Week 2023

Israeli protests – Photo licensed under the Creative Commons, Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Design – Israeli protests taking over Jerusalem and across the whole country were the backdrop of this year’s Jerusalem Design Week which explored the power of lies and falsehoods in contemporary societies. “We live in an era of misinformation, fake news, and loss of trust in political institutions,” explains Jeremy Fogel, co-curator of the twelfth edition of the Israel’s largest annual design event.

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Jerusalem Design Week 2023 at the Hansen House – Photo by Dor Kedmi, courtesy of JDW.

The design week coincided with an exceptional time of turmoils. Since the start of 2023, Israelis took to the streets to protest against judicial reforms allowing a government majority to overrule court decisions. The reform has just been voted on, and the protests are expected to continue.

“Many of us juggled working on Jerusalem Design Week while participating in protests and just generally worrying about the awful degradation of the world around us.” Said the curators in a statement.

“When we were talking about the ‘Lies and Falsehoods’ theme about a year ago, we had no clue how relevant it would sound in the current Israeli political, social and cultural climate, where for many of us, there is a sense of emergency and a sense of regime change,” Fogel said in an interview with Dezeen.

Deceiving materials, Artificial Intelligence, illusions and misinformation are only some of the key topics explored by Jerusalem Design Week 2023. For the Propaganda exhibition, for example, designers have been tasked to uncover the manipulative mechanisms behind today’s designed propaganda, including cultural appropriation and cancel culture.

Life (Outside the Cave) exhibition @ Jerusalem Design Week 2023.

“We knew the theme would generally be relevant because of the period we are in – not only in Israel but worldwide. Everywhere we are concerned with fake news, deep fakes and the loss of trust in political institutions,” Fogel continued.

Jerusalem Design Week is an initiative of the Jerusalem Ministry and the Jerusalem Development Authority and is held under the direction of Hansen House and Ran Wolf Company. However, co-curator Sonja Olitsky pointed out that even if the government founded the event, “we were not obliged to some sort of propaganda so that you can see here a rich range of voices, opinions and creators.”