Traces of Light

The Department of Phototherapy hosts an evening of talks exploring the concept of “light-years”. The discussions unfold within the tension between external light, which captures the movement of time across the sky through long exposures, and an inner light seeking its way to the surface from within repressed experiences.
Three speakers from different fields will present short lectures exploring the in-between spaces between documentary photography, which freezes a moment in time, and AI-generated synthetic imagery, which makes it possible to create an entirely new present and play anew with the boundaries of time and memory.

Dr. Hagar Hazaz Berger is an anthropologist, a faculty member at Ono Academic College, and an interdisciplinary fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her research draws on philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic anthropology, focusing on the phenomenology of everyday life. Her articles and essays appear in leading international academic journals and publications.
Lecture: An Aesthetics of Zero Distance: From Light-Years to Night Vision

Bezalel Ben-Chaim is an artist and photographer. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and is a graduate of the Midrasha School of Art’s postgraduate programme at Beit Berl College.
His artistic practice explores light and darkness, vision and its limits, and the relationships between image, memory, and reality. He is drawn to the moment when things cease to be clear, and to photography’s potential to capture precisely what eludes the eye.

Dana Biran facilitates group processes in phototherapy and visual communication. Over the years, she has developed and led workshops and training programmes for professionals in therapy, education, and welfare. Today, her work also explores the intersection of phototherapy, creativity, and artificial intelligence. She is the founder of WonderMe, an AI-assisted platform for emotional creativity that enables users to transform an experience, feeling, or thought into an image, text, or video as part of a process of reflection and processing.

Curator and Moderator Vered Rahat
Participants Dr. Hagar Hazaz Berger, Bezalel Ben-Chaim, Dana Biran