Dr. Noa Roei – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Noa Roei

University of Amsterdam
Visual Culture

External Junior Fellow
Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow
September 2019 – August 2020

Last Update: 31.08.2020

Curriculum Vitae

Noa Roei is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is also a board member of gate48, platform for critical Israeli’s in the Netherlands. Noa completed her Ph.D. in 2012 on Militarism and Visual Culture in Israeli society. She holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in Art History and Psychology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Noa has published material on various aspects of Israeli visual culture in several edited volumes and journals. Her book, Civic Aesthetics: Militarism, Israeli Art, and Visual Culture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) presents the multifaceted representations of militarism in contemporary Israeli art. Current research interests include the interrelationships between politics and aesthetics; vision and visuality; performance theory; nationalism and the construction of national identity (also in relation to gender, class, and race); intersectionality; and critical theory.

Selected Publications

Civic Aesthetics: Militarism, Israeli Art and Visual Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
“Making National Heritage move: Ilya Rabinovich’s ‘Museutopia’ projects.” Espacio,Tiempo y Forma 4 (2016): 261-277.
“Consuming Nostalgia: Greetings to the Soldier-Citizen.” Narratives of Dissent: War in Israeli Arts and Culture, eds. Ranen Omer-Sherman and Rachel S. Harris. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. 78-98.
“Molding Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics in the Struggle of Bil’in Against the Wall.” Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture, eds. Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernandez-Navarro. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 239-256.
“Framing Art as Action: Rethinking Refusal in Contemporary Israeli Art.” Afterimage 34 (2006). 38-42.

FRIAS Project

Sensing Vision: Performative Encounters with the Politics of Spectatorship in Contemporary Art from the Middle East

My project focuses on novel artistic approaches to the politics of vision within the context of conflict and war. I examine artistic projects and theoretical texts that translate viewing practices to the tactile, aural, affective or vocal realms, and argue for the essential contribution of multi-sensory practices of image comprehension to situations of national conflict, where images are often mobilized to propagate social and political messages in ways that render them both visually pervasive and overdetermined. The failure of images to effectively participate in social struggles is often ascribed in scholarship to modern, disembodied ways of looking; following this line of thought, my project examines contemporary artistic performances and installations that contest the assumed relationships between images and their viewers, and in so doing, open up possibilities for novel, and more engaged ways of looking. The project’s main goal is twofold: firstly, it wishes to provide a theoretical contribution to critical studies of contemporary visual culture; secondly, it presents a specific empirical enrichment of the field within the geo-political region of the middle east, in that all of the artistic materials relate (some directly, others in more abstract terms) to this region, with a special focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.