Avital Barak is an art curator and a scholar of culture, movement, and performance. Her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University (2023) focused on the varieties of resistance visible in manifestations of movement in the public space. Her curatorial work includes exhibitions based on research, public events, and leading transdisciplinary research groups. In the last decade, she curated solo exhibitions and group exhibitions based on research in Israel and abroad and published articles in prominent journals and publications in Hebrew and English. Since 2017, she has been co-developing a method of “collective investigation” at the Institute of Public Presence (CDA).

Her current project delves into the revolutionary moving image archives of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the relationship between the militants, intellectuals, and artists who took an active role in those struggles and the interrelation between armed struggle as resistance and its representations, past and present. The research aims to study resistance in the entanglement of political and aesthetic action out of interest in understanding the changing position of artists and the moving image concerning political struggles as well as the dramatic shift in the perception of armed struggle and political violence in liberal public discourse, academia, and the art world.