Wandering, Walking, Trauma and Art

A conversation between Prof. Haviva Pedaya and Prof. Stephanos Stephanides

Point Centre for Contemporary Art cordially invites you to an event, organised in cooperation with the Embassy of Israel in Cyprus, under the theme Cultural Geographies.

A conversation about the geography of culture as a means of “mapping”, where and how certain modes of creativity and their traditions became uprooted and transported to new contexts and transformed. Prof. Haviva Pedaya, a philosopher, researcher of Judaism, Mysticism (east and west), Kabbalah and Hasidism examines some light-motives as walking, the two ex-trims of land and sea, between Jewish history and Israel. Prof. Stephanos Stephanides -a Cyprus based scholar, poet and cultural critic- will discuss with Prof. Pedaya the act of art and poetry, as a kind of healing.

Prof. Haviva Pedaya, is a poet, author and cultural critic born in Jerusalem in 1965 to a family of rabbis and kabbalists and lives in Beersheba. She studied at the Hebrew University and the School of Visual Arts in Jerusalem. Pedaya is at present professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and head of the Elyachar Center for Sephardi Heritage. She has published articles on religion, sociology, art, history, and mysticism as well as three full-length studies and three volumes of poetry. She is also involved in musical and artistic projects, and founded the Yonah Ensemble which has succeeded in revitalizing liturgical and mystical music of the Near East. Pedaya has won many awards, among them the Harry Harshon Award, the Warburg Prize, the Bernstein Prize for Poetry (1997) and the President's Prize for Poetry (2004).

Prof. Stephanos Stephanides is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic and documentary film maker. He is fluent in English, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese, English being his dominant and literary language. Selections of his poetry have been published in more than twelve languages, and he has held residential writing and research fellowships in the UK, US, Italy, India, and Greece. In 1992 he joined the founding faculty of the University of Cyprus where he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He was awarded first prize in the poetry competition of the Society of Anthropology and Humanism (American Anthropological Association, 1988). He has served as a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2000 and 2010). He was made Fellow of the English Association in 2003, and Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy in 2007.