Stockholm-based designers Noam Dover (born in Jerusalem in 1975) and Michal Cederbaum (born in Haifa in 1976) met in the early 2000s while earning their Bachelor’s degrees at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem. The pair founded their eponymous, collaborative design studio in 2009 in Tel Aviv. In 2011, they moved to a bigger studio in Ein Ayala, a village in northern Israel, before relocating again to Stockholm in the summer of 2015. In addition to their creative collaboration, the couple is happily married with two children.
Dover and Cederbaum’s work spans multiple arenas, including furniture, handmade objects, scenography, interior design, graphic design, urban design, theoretical writing, and street art. They frequently collaborate with other artists and designers as well in order to further foster a multidisciplinary dialogue. They are committed to questioning the traditional boundaries between design, crafts, and production; fusing techniques and materials; addressing the cultural origins and baggage of materials and techniques; and creating objects that reveal the processes that brought them to life. For Dover and Cederbaum, design is about expression on the most basic level, and their work is consistently poetic and lyrical.
Standout projects to date include: Forbidden Lakes (2015), a collection of twelve unique plates depicting silhouettes of lakes in locations the designers found via Google Earth, which they are not allowed to visit for various geopolitical reasons; and Hacking the Mould, a series of experimental objects cast in stoneware that reflect two contemporary phenomena: hacker culture and maker culture.
Together, the pair has collaborated with theater director Amit Drori on several productions, including stage design for Orlando (2009) and Savanna: A Possible Landscape (2011). They have been awarded first prize for curating the Israeli contribution at the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2007) as well as third prize for the Alix de Rothschild competition for Israeli craft (2012).
Cederbaum and Dover’s work has been presented at several institutions and events across the globe, including, but not limited to: Containers, a solo exhibition at Design Miami (2012), Around the Table, Design Museum Holon at Design Tide (Tokyo, 2012), Designing the Middle East, a solo exhibition at 19 Greek Street Gallery (London, 2013), Suspicious Objects at Tower of David Museum (Jerusalem, 2013), Human Made, Elizabeth Leriche Gallery at Maison et Objet (Paris, 2015), and Soft-Crisp-Transparent at Milan Design Week (2016), among others.
Noam Dover graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design in 2003; as of this writing, he is currently working on a Master’s degree at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm (Konstfack), specializing in glass. From 2000 to 2010, he was a member of the Zik Group for visual art. His projects include: scenography for Death in Slippers (2004), interior design for David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem (2004-2005), scenography for Terminal (2005-2006), furniture and exhibition design for Tel-Hai Historical Museum (2005-2006), visual concept and scenography for Orlando (2008-2009), and numerous ceramic, wood, and glass vessels.
Michal Cederbaum graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication in 2004. Her work also spans graphic design, crafts, street art, curation, and cultural-theoretical writing, and she has taught graphic design at the Wizo Design Academy in Haifa. Her work includes: text design for the Łódź Ghetto memorial in Łódź, Poland (2004), Hearts and Street Signs in Tel Aviv (2004-ongoing), graphic design for the Tel-Hai Historical Museum (2005-2006), curation of the Israeli exhibition at the 11th Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy (2007-2008), and projections design for Orlando (2008-2009).
The Exceptional
