Room 245, Mandel Building, Mt. Scopus Campus | matan.aviel@mail.huji.ac.il

 

Matan Aviel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History, and was a President's Stipend recipient at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities before joining the Mandel Scholion Center as a PhD member of the "Passivities" Research Group.

Matan graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a BSc in Mathematics and Art History, and an MA in Art History as part of the Honors Students program of the Mandel School.

He is interested in the materiality of works of art, cultural exchange, and the emotional experience engendered in different spaces.

 

His doctoral research, written under the supervision of Dr. Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, focuses on funerary monuments and chapels built in Southern Italy between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, where inventive interactions between architecture, sculpture, and objects are present.

These arrangements demand the viewers to walk around or under sculptures, or invite the visitors to sit on them.

The research aims to highlight how different media and objects are used together to evoke an emotional and mental response, and how the perception of space and bodily sensation initiate a cognitive experience that could supply knowledge or intuition about a heavenly world.