The third and final year of study in the department is designed to support and accompany students as they work on their final projects, which will be presented in the school’s graduation exhibition. Two year-long courses are dedicated to mentoring the final project and accompany the process throughout the year; these include panels, individual mentoring meetings, and individual and group submissions. Students also take several advanced courses intended to deepen the areas of specialization they chose in their second year and to support the personal projects that develop over the course of the year.
In addition, during the first semester students participate in a socially engaged art project that takes place in the Musrara neighborhood and take a dedicated course on the subject. Alongside participation in workshops, exhibition tours, and a multidisciplinary colloquium, students take a professional development course in the second semester that provides practical tools for integration and professional establishment within the art field in Israel.
Third-year students in the department are required to complete eight mandatory courses (five year-long and three semester-long) and to participate in the multidisciplinary colloquium. Students must successfully pass all eight courses and submit a final project at the end of the year in order to complete their studies and receive a graduation certificate from the department at Musrara.
Third-year students who wish to do so (or who are required to make up credit hours due to deficiencies from previous years) are invited to enroll in second-year elective courses, provided that these do not conflict with the third-year mandatory course schedule.
A year-long course accompanying students throughout the development of their individual final projects, to be presented in the school’s graduation exhibition. The course approaches the final project as an opportunity to precisely articulate the meeting point between the student’s inner world and the external world, and to express it through a sharp, well-argued, and cohesive artistic gesture.
The course opens with a series of meetings devoted to in-depth exploration of each student’s portfolio, in order to identify their central artistic interests and the working processes best suited to them. From there, we move on to focused exercises that encourage students to dive deeper into their personal creative processes. Along the way, we will examine works by artists with an emphasis on the processes behind the works, particularly interdisciplinary projects that involve collaboration between creators from different fields.
The course is conducted from the premise that students and instructor are peers and creative partners, sharing the goal of cultivating a safe and supportive space for discussion, creation, and experimentation. We will practice several formats for critical discussion and feedback based on students’ submissions and individual works. The course includes group meetings, individual mentoring sessions, tours, panels, and submissions. Spatial installation submissions will take place in collaboration and coordination with the course Free Dive.
The aim of the course is to develop students’ awareness of long-term working processes and to expand their theoretical and practical toolkits in shaping a structured path toward the final project. Drawing on the instructor’s curatorial perspective and experience accompanying artists at various stages of their working processes toward exhibitions, the course provides a comprehensive framework that enables each student to dive into a linear process, including multiple interim stages throughout the year.
These stages include submissions, exercises, and presentations brought to collective class discussion, as well as individual meetings, panels, exhibition tours, a mid-year exhibition, and more. The goal is that, by the end of the process, the tools and media each student chooses to work with will coalesce into a distinct language that serves a complete and coherent artistic trajectory.
Throughout the year, we will address fundamental questions regarding the motivations that drive artistic action: how to develop an intuitive but unarticulated idea or thought; the intentions, concepts, and impulses behind the work; relationships between form, material, and content; relationships between works and the construction of an internal syntax that connects them; and relationships between image, space, and viewer.
The course will engage extensively with curatorial approaches and diverse installation practices in space (format, scale, materiality, editing, type of space, and modes of display), examining how a work translates into spatial presence, how installation affects the reading of a work, and how the work encounters the viewer. Students will be encouraged to use writing as a tool that accompanies their creative process. These raw materials will serve as the foundation for the final text accompanying the graduation project.
The first semester is divided into two complementary parts: “What Is Contemporary?” and “Stretching the Medium.” Their aim is to sharpen critical reading and practice by examining the relationship between three key elements in creative processes—content, context, and medium—with an emphasis on video.
Throughout the semester, students will be exposed to a wide range of local and international artistic materials, focusing on contemporary artists whose work challenges the video medium. In some cases, access will also be given to materials from the artists’ working processes themselves—research, images excluded from the final project, editing stages, and more. Through this exposure and analysis of diverse works and artistic languages, students will be required to further refine and develop their own personal language and working methodology.
The second semester will focus on developing each student’s final project, with particular emphasis on applying the concepts and ideas that emerged during the first semester. At the beginning of each class, students will be invited to present materials from their ongoing processes to the group and raise questions and challenges for discussion. During the semester, students will meet via Zoom with emerging international video artists who will share the unique challenges of the medium—installation, technology, collaboration, funding, and more—as well as with curators from galleries and exhibition spaces dedicated to video and installation works.
The Professional Tools course focuses on gaining familiarity with the Israeli art field and acquiring practical tools and strategies for integrating into it. During the course, we will explore the opportunities available within the local professional community, become better acquainted with exhibition spaces and institutions we may wish to work with in the future, learn how to write applications and build portfolios, and acquire additional critical skills.
By the end of the course, each student will prepare an initial portfolio to take into the professional world and deliver a presentation (approximately ten minutes) on the body of work in their graduation exhibition to the entire department. In addition, students will undergo in-class simulations and receive external feedback on the presentation of the body of work they developed during the semester.
The Professional Tools course focuses on gaining familiarity with the Israeli art field and acquiring practical tools and strategies for integrating into it. During the course, we will explore the opportunities available within the local professional community, become better acquainted with exhibition spaces and institutions we may wish to work with in the future, learn how to write applications and build portfolios, and acquire additional critical skills.
This course offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the history of local art through 12 sessions, each focusing on a central theme that cuts across the field: identity, gender, ethnicity, politics, memory, religion, landscape, collectivity, the body, and more. Each class begins with a contemporary artwork and then moves backward in time through the history of art in Israel, addressing key developments alongside alternative perspectives.
Throughout the course, we will examine how art is mobilized for national, gendered, or religious discourse; how it creates collective memory; how it protests, erases, and constructs new realities. The course includes lectures, discussions, and meetings with active artists.
The Hebrew word Atar (site) derives from the root ת.ו.ר – “to scout” or “to locate.” In the Bible, the “scouts” (tarim) are those who walk the land; their search is an active act. The feet walk, the scouts search — searching with both heart and body. Through feet and heart, we seek to encounter ourselves through the external world, an encounter that allows new knowledge to flow through the unique channel that is us. We allow the “I” to meet the “HERE.”
This year the course will take place in the historic and unique YMCA building in Jerusalem. Through weekly presence in the space, each student will identify—through body and heart—the “third thing” that emerges from the encounter between their inner self and this specific place: what kind of knowledge seeks to flow through this momentary meeting.
The process will be structured and gradual. We will refine the guiding question that leads toward a new, distilled action, which will be presented on site as the final project for the course.
For students originally enrolled in the Photography Department
The course aims to accompany students in developing and presenting a coherent body of work, while tracing a personal working axis and a distinct visual signature. This will take place alongside deepening the student’s critical perspective toward photographic works and phenomena in general, and toward their own work in particular. Special attention will be given to aspects such as the use of technical means of production, responsibility and precision regarding the components of the work, narrowing the gap between intention and execution, presentation, exhibition simulations, and more.
The course offers tools and approaches for engaging with modes of presentation, framing, and delivery of musical and sound-based works. When presenting their work to an audience, musicians face questions that largely parallel those in contemporary art and performance: How will the audience encounter the work? What will they see, experience, feel, understand? What additional elements can support the work?
The course begins by stepping beyond purely musical and technical questions, focusing instead on the conceptual clarification of the core meaning of the musical work. Through exercises drawn from performance and visual art, we will consider meaning in a musical context, refine artistic intentions, create conditions for listening, and position the work along the axis between abstraction and concreteness. The course includes discussion, reading, and practical assignments.
This course invites you to use Adobe After Effects as a powerful creative tool for realizing your artistic vision. The course is divided into two stages. In the first stage, we will build a technical foundation through an introduction to animation principles, composition, and layers, enabling all participants to gain basic confidence and control in the software. In the second stage, we will embark on a personal creative journey in which you are the driving force and the course adapts to your goals. Each student will define a personal project based on their interests and artistic contexts. We will learn how to use technological tools to solve artistic challenges and translate abstract ideas into concrete forms. Through this process, we will discover how After Effects becomes a working tool that offers new and compelling possibilities of expression. By the end of the course, students will leave with a solid technical foundation and, more importantly, with a complete and unique project that expresses their personal voice and mastery of the new tool.
The course provides a broad understanding of sound design in the digital world through the operation and conceptual understanding of synthesizers and diverse synthesis techniques (additive, subtractive, wavetable, granular), as well as the use of real-world sounds via sampling. The goal of the course is to develop a conceptual understanding of personal sound design that expands the student’s musical toolbox and pushes the boundaries of their creative practice. The course is based on the software Reaktor and Ableton Live.
The birth of music: between ritual and power, the romantic spirit, change, rebellion, protest, energy — what is the revolutionary impulse? Different approaches to revolution: the emotional sources of free music, and the revolutionary origins of sound-focused music.
Minimalism is perhaps the most important and influential movement in music of the past fifty years. The course presents the emergence of early minimalism in 1950s New York and its branching into a wide range of highly distinct practices and approaches. The aim is to instill in students the far-reaching aesthetic insights derived from minimalism. To this end, students will be exposed to the development of the minimalist tradition, which brought new understandings of sound and a radical shift in the perception of musical
In this course, students will practice songwriting (lyrics and melody, accompanied by an initial arrangement element), with an emphasis on developing observational skills focused on images from various media (painting, photography, sculpture, cinema) as well as on everyday environments we encounter in daily life (the street, public transportation, cafés, etc.). By cultivating these observational abilities as sources of inspiration, the course aims to provide practical tools for deepening the description of places, objects, and characters through the use of text, melody, and sound.
The course is structured into three units of four sessions each, with each unit dedicated to a different theme. Throughout each unit, we will observe and analyze works from various fields related to the unit’s theme and work on writing and composition exercises that engage with it. At the conclusion of each unit, students will write a song that draws on the raw materials developed through the writing and composition exercises, as well as on materials gathered through observation and listening.
Course meetings will combine short lectures that examine the unit themes from multiple perspectives, submissions of take-home exercises assigned from session to session, and collaborative in-class exercises.
Course requirements: regular attendance, submission of all weekly assignments given throughout the course, and submission of one song at the conclusion of each unit (a total of three songs).
Beginning in the 2025–2026 academic year, the Arts Department will establish a student exchange program with the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Department of Art) and the School of Visual Theater. The department will host students from Bezalel and the School of Visual Theater in courses at Musrara, and in return, Musrara students will be able to enroll in selected courses at these two institutions.
Any second- or third-year student in the Arts Department at Musrara who is interested may apply to take up to one course at an external institution, in place of one of the elective courses in their regular curriculum.
Please note: the number of places allocated to Musrara students in courses at Bezalel and the School of Visual Theater is limited. In cases where there is high demand for a particular course, placement will be determined by lottery.
Mondays, 9:00–16:00, Semester A
2 places available
This course seeks to blur the boundaries between the virtual and the physical through installations and sculptural practices that combine various media with software-based outputs. Throughout the course, students will work extensively with 3D software (Blender), which enables the creation of material simulations including lighting, architecture, sculpture, and animation within virtual spaces. Blender is an open-source, groundbreaking platform widely used by designers, artists, and game developers.
Through this software, students will develop complex processes of model-building and parallel spatial construction. The course will examine artistic practices that integrate multiple dimensions, including installations, projections, virtual environments, and 3D scanning and printing. Students will deepen their knowledge of 3D tools and learn techniques for creating animation and active environments. The course will also introduce a wide range of contemporary media artists and explore the ideas that emerge from the encounter between contemporary art and new media.
Tuesdays, 14:00–17:00, Semester B
2 places available
Artists spend their time in ongoing attempts to invent worlds in which poetic moments are generated and unfold—“miracles” or “disasters,” mistakes and missteps. These two moments are essential to living, dynamic, and learning art, and their value forms the point of departure for this course, which offers an alternative approach to traditional conceptions of printmaking.
The course focuses on expanding possible modes of action within the print medium, integrating ways of seeing that parallel drawing practices through diverse and unconventional print techniques, such as stamping, frottage, imprinting, working with stencils, and more. Printmaking—closely related in many respects to drawing—will give way to action and gesture, allowing traces to emerge as tools that extend the boundaries of the body. Through these traces, we will examine the body’s relationship to the limits of the paper surface.