David Adika (b. 1970, Jerusalem) lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo. He graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, where he currently works as the  head of the photography department. For more than two decades, Adika has embraced photography as a powerful tool for storytelling and critical thinking through his teaching and his practice.

Adika’s photography broadcasts absolute sensuality, while portraying people and objects through a critical and inquisitive gaze. He photographs artifacts that tie together his personal political and social realities – Israeli ceramics, Middle Eastern copper items, and other craft objects.  They are all decorations, taking part in a celebration of beauty and seduction. Their beauty is not the product of any hierarchical correspondence between the object itself and its idea; instead it becomes realized on the surface – a sort of incidental, quotidian beauty. Through the photographic act, Adika attempts to instill beauty in everything, but leaves the value judgment to the viewer.

Adika’s gaze towards his subjects creates a new relationship between object, image, sign and value. The visual rhetoric of his photographs works to confront the various social, cultural, and political connotations of the objects; his gaze creates a new economy, beyond instrumentalization and objectification, and can mark passions that are not only about ownership and possession. In this way he seeks to expose the connection between vision and passion, artifacts and art. In his photographs, this difference is set in motion like an echo that is simultaneously present and absent, real and imagined, hidden and on display for all to see.

Adika has exhibited solo at such venues as the Petach Tikva Museum Of Art (scheduled 2020); Dietrich and Schleimer Gallery, Berlin (scheduled 2020); Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv (scheduled 2019, 2013); Galerie Klubovna, Brno, Czech Republic (2017); MAMbo, Museo Morandi, Bologna, Italy (2016); The Open Museum of Photography, Tel-Hai, Israel (2015); Latvian National Museum Of Art, Riga (2014); and The Open Lens Gallery at The Gershman Y, Philadelphia (2012); among others.

Adika is a recipient of awards from the Israel Ministry of Culture, the Jack Nailor Award for Cinematography from the Haifa Film Festival, and more. He has participated in several international residency programs, including: the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York; Cite Internationale Des Arts Residency, Paris; HANGAR Residency, Barcelona; the Ricolette Residency, Paris; and was a resident at Artport Tel Aviv from 2015-2016.