A Site for Sore Eyes

A Site for Sore Eyes brings together Pompeii, Japan’s Ōwakudani Valley, and an Antwerp sculpture studio as one imagined site, examining how preservation, access, concealment, and display shape the ways the past is seen and remembered in the present.

A Site for Sore Eyes is Assaf Hinden’s solo exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, curated by Danielle Tzadka Cohen. It brings together photographs made across three geographical and conceptual sites: the archaeological park of Pompeii, the volcanic landscape of Ōwakudani Valley in Japan, and a sculpture studio at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.

Rather than presenting these places as documentary records, Hinden constructs them as a single imaginary site. Archaeological remains, natural phenomena, unfinished sculptures, conservation devices, protective coverings, access structures, and gestures of display coexist throughout the installation. Each location reveals a different process through which matter is preserved, framed, interpreted, or transformed into evidence.

In Pompeii, ancient stone, weathering, chemical residues, and fragments of painted walls appear alongside elevated walkways, railings, structural reinforcements, and conservation tools. One photograph focuses on plaster washers—metal fasteners used to stabilize unstable layers of plaster. Enlarged through photography, these contemporary additions become artifacts in their own right, drawing attention to the way preservation alters the appearance and meaning of what survives. Pompeii emerges not only as an archaeological site, but also as an exhibition space in which the past is continuously produced through maintenance, reconstruction, access, and display.

The exhibition also includes a video work based on a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), in which the plaster cast of two figures embracing at the moment of death is uncovered in Pompeii. Hinden removes the original image and projects only the subtitles. The absent image persists through language and through the viewer’s attempt to reconstruct it, shifting attention from what is shown to how an image is imagined and remembered.

In Ōwakudani, volcanic gas, steam, and yellow sulfur deposits create a landscape that appears both ancient and strangely artificial. Observation platforms, paths, warnings, and systems of controlled access shape the encounter with the valley, revealing nature itself as a mediated experience.

The sculpture studio in Antwerp functions as a reverse excavation site: unfinished works already resemble relics. Covered with plastic sheets, they appear protected, concealed, and suspended in time. By photographing them before completion, Hinden turns the process of making into testimony.

The exhibition’s title replaces “sight” with “site,” shifting attention from appearance to the conditions that produce it. Across the works, supports, barriers, coverings, subtitles, and conservation procedures determine how the image reaches the viewer. Hinden invites a slower form of looking, asking how places organize vision, how matter becomes evidence, and how absence, mediation, and imagination allow an image to endure.

• Text adapted from the exhibition text by Danielle Tzadka Cohen.

• Installation views photographed by Elad Sarig.