Assaf Hinden / A Site for Sore Eyes

Assaf Hinden (b. 1988, Kfar Saba, Israel) approaches photography with an awareness of the medium’s mechanisms, boundaries, and historical conditions. His work moves between lens-based practices and archival strategies, exploring how images are not only created, but also preserved, processed, and sustained.
Hinden’s new series brings three geographical and conceptual focal points together: the archaeological site of Pompeii, the volcanic landscape of the Ōwakudani Valley in Japan, and a sculpture studio at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In the exhibition A Site for Sore Eyes, these three sites are melded into one imaginary site, where remnants, interventions, and acts of preservation and reconstruction coexist. Within it, the world comes into view through extensions, in which the historical is revealed and activated in the present as a continuous stratification of time and matter. Hinden’s visual research examines how sites and display mechanisms process memory, and how different stages of mediation, facilitation of access, concealment, and exposure transform the surface into a cultural artifact. In doing so, it reveals how human interventions preserve the past while concurrently defining how we see and understand it.
Hinden documents Pompeii as an active archaeological site that is also an exhibition space: ancient stone, traces of weathering, and chemical residues intersect with human interventions in the form of elevated access walkways, railings, and contemporary structural reinforcements; an enlarged photograph of a wall with plaster washers—metal fasteners used by conservators to re-anchor and stabilize layers of plaster and to prevent the collapse of loose wall sections—is reframed via photography as a contemporary archaeological artifact. The encounter between a substance bearing the marks of time and recent support structures that seek to frame and reconstruct it attests to the tension between preservative maintenance, reconstruction, and illusion. Pompeii Archaeological Park thus manifests itself as a space in which the past is carried into the present through archival practices of ordering and display.
In an earlier work from 2017 (which debuted in the exhibition “Talking Bones” at Artspace, TLV, co-curated with Bar Yerushalmi), Hinden turns to a pivotal scene from Roberto Rossellini׳s Journey to Italy (1954). The film׳s protagonists, a married couple whose relationship is unraveling, visit Pompeii and find themselves before the plaster cast of an embracing couple petrified in death. The moment of encounter with this image binds time, death, and preservation together. By projecting only the subtitles and withholding the image itself from the viewer, attention is redirected to the way an image persists in its absence—as a presence sustained through its representation, and as something completed by the viewer׳s imagination—while the text declares: ״Look! You can begin to see something!״
The series of photographs from the active volcanic valley of Ōwakudani in Japan—the “Great Boiling Valley” or “Great Hell Valley” in Japanese—focuses on a surface on the verge of eruption. Gas emissions, steam, and yellow sulfur deposits create a dystopian landscape where ancient geological matter meets a contemporary tourist infrastructure. The near-radioactive yellow, the abstraction, and the physicality of the landscape intensify the site׳s presence as both a natural phenomenon and a mediated experience. This liminal space, known for its “Martian״ landscapes, emerges as a form of nature whose meaning is shaped by mediation and observation itself.
The third focal point—a sculpture studio at the academy where Hinden studied—functions as a reverse excavation site in an intimate and immediate sense; a place where what is still a work in progress already looks like a relic. The sculptures, covered with plastic sheets for protection, resemble bodies frozen in time. The covering protects them while simultaneously shaping their appearance, as documentation precedes the completion of the sculpture, transforming it into testimony. The artist׳s studio—where tributes to art history (e.g. Botticelli׳s Birth of Venus and Michelangelo׳s Rebellious Slave) inhabit an everyday workspace alongside bins and brooms—becomes an arena in which the archaeological and artistic practices intertwine.
Between Pompeii frozen in time, the volcanic landscape, and the studio, the exhibition title—A Site for Sore Eyes—replaces sight with site, shifting the emphasis from appearance to place, while retaining the affinity with the eye and the act of seeing. The title binds site and gaze, space and observation together, foregrounding—already at the level of language—one of the central questions posed by the exhibition as it addresses vision itself. Beyond pointing to what is seen on site, the exhibition asks how the site itself actively shapes the conditions of vision, experience, and memory. The works suspend the gaze at the place where the world is both made and seen: in layers of mediation, supporting structures, coverings, additions, and gestures of preservation; in the way the image is transmitted to the eye and body, materializing in the exhibition space. Hinden׳s work proposes a slowing down, attentive observation, and inquiry into the conditions that allow the image to take shape and endure. He invites the viewer into the site׳s construction methods, into the ways matter becomes testimony and visual manifestation carries memory, along with the possibility of imagination.

The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of
Lauren and Mitchell Presser
Shay Daniel Milow
Braverman Gallery: Adi Gura, Yaffa Braverman