Asaf Hinden: A Site for Sore Eyes

Asaf Hindin (born 1988, Kfar Saba) considers the photographic medium while remaining aware of its mechanisms, limitations, and historical conditions. His work ranges from lens-based practices to processes of collecting, preservation, and archiving, examining how images are produced and preserved.

Hindin’s new body of work brings together three geographical and intellectual axes: the archaeological site of Pompeii, the volcanic area of Ōwakudani Valley in Japan, and the sculpture studio at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In the exhibition A Site for Sore Eyes, the three sites merge into an imagined location where remnants, covered layers, additions, and processes of preservation and restoration coexist. At this site, the world appears through additions, as the historical is revealed and operates in the present as a continuous accumulation of time and matter.

Hindin’s visual research examines how sites and display mechanisms shape our memory, and how stages of mediation and access, concealment and revelation, become means of making the surface culturally visible. In this way, the exhibition reveals how human interventions preserve the past while simultaneously determining how we see and understand it.

Hindin documents Pompeii as an archaeological site that is also an exhibition space: ancient stones, traces of erosion, and chemical residues meet human interventions such as access bridges, barriers, and contemporary engineering additions. An enlarged image of a wall fitted with stitching pins—metal pins inserted by restorers to bind layers of plaster and prevent the collapse of fragile sections of the wall—is reconfigured through the act of photography as a contemporary archaeological artifact. The encounter between material bearing the marks of time and new additions seeking to frame and restore it points to the tension between preservation, restoration, and visual illusion. Thus, Pompeii’s archaeological park becomes a space where the past is carried into the present through archival procedures of organization and display.

In an earlier work from 2017, first presented in the exhibition Bone News at Makom Le’Omanut, co-curated with Bar Yerushalmi, Hindin addresses the pivotal scene in Roberto Rossellini’s film Journey to Italy (1954): the film’s married couple, whose relationship has reached an impasse, visit Pompeii and stand before a plaster cast of a couple who embraced and were petrified to death. The moment of revelation before this image brings together time, death, and preservation. Displaying only the subtitles conceals the image from the viewer and redirects attention to the way the image continues to exist despite its absence—as a presence preserved through its representation, and as something completed by the viewer in their imagination—while the text announces: “Look, something can begin to be seen!”

The series of images from Ōwakudani, an active volcanic valley in Japan known in Japanese as the “Boiling Valley” or “Great Valley of Hell,” focuses on surfaces that appear to be on the verge of boiling. Gas emissions, hot steam, and yellow sulfur deposits create a dystopian landscape in which ancient geological matter meets contemporary tourist infrastructure. The almost radioactive yellow, the abstraction of the landscape, and its physical character deepen the site’s presence as both a natural phenomenon and a mediated experience. This threshold space, known for its “Martian” landscapes, is revealed as a nature in which mediation and looking themselves shape meaning.

The third axis—the sculpture studio at the academy where Hindin studied—functions here as a reversed excavation site, in an intimate and close-up version. It is a place where what is still in the process of being made appears as a surviving artifact. Sculptures covered with protective nylon sheets resemble bodies suspended in time. The covering preserves them, but also shapes their appearance, so that documentation precedes the completion of the sculpture and turns it into a testimony. The artist’s studio—where gestures that become art history, such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave, coexist in the daily workspace with trash bins and brooms—becomes an arena in which archaeological labor intertwines with artistic practice.

Between Pompeii, frozen in time, the volcanic landscape, and the studio, the exhibition title A Site for Sore Eyes replaces the word “sight” with “site.” This shift moves the center of meaning from the scene to the site while retaining the connection to the eye and the act of seeing. The title brings together site and gaze, space and contemplation, reinforcing—on the level of language itself—one of the exhibition’s central questions as it touches upon the act of seeing. Alongside referring to what is seen at the site, the exhibition asks how the site itself actively shapes the conditions of the viewer’s vision, experience, and memory.

The works delay the gaze at a site where the world becomes visible and takes shape: in layers of mediation, supporting structures, coverings, additions, and gestures of preservation; in the way an image is delivered to the eye and body and acquires presence within the exhibition space. Hindin’s works propose slowness, contemplation, and an examination of the conditions that allow an image to appear and exist. They invite the viewer to enter into the mechanisms through which a site is constructed, and into the ways matter becomes testimony and visual appearance becomes a carrier of memory—as well as of the possibility of imagination.