When Billboards Talk: An Experiment in Berlin

Katya Assaf-Zakharov is a senior lecturer at the Law Faculty and the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studied law with a minor in sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (LL.B. and LL.M.) and did her Ph.D. studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich as a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Competition and Innovation.

Katya has written on a variety of legal topics, such as advertising, trademarks, patents, freedom of expression, media regulation, defamation, and affirmative action. Her writings critically analyze consumer culture, brand fetishism, and capitalist ideology. They always combine legal analysis with insights from other disciplines, such as economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and semiotics. She is also interested in comparative law, particularly in comparing German and US-American legal regulations and tracing their cultural and philosophic roots. 

Recently, Katya’s research has begun to focus on urban public space. Together with the photographer Tim Schnetgöke, she is working to unearth the narratives embedded in our shared visual environment and criticize their legal regulation, such as the uneven treatment of graffiti or the privileged position of commercial advertising in public space. They aspire to develop a concept of a more inclusive city – one that would grant its residents a right to design and redesign public spaces. They are now looking to start an experiment implementing this idea as a project that would allow city residents to place their contributions – texts of images – in visible urban sites.

Tim Schnetgöeke is a professional portrait and editorial photographer who studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, Germany. His work has been featured on record covers, websites and numerous international magazines and publications.