Ronen Zien: Walking Into

A few years ago, a newspaper published an interview with a mother who lost her son. In the interview, she described how, during the first year of mourning, she refused to look at his photographs, gathering all his pictures and tucking them away in a drawer. She expressed her wish to preserve his memory as she had experienced him in life – alive and present – a memory rooted in her personal experience rather than in photographs.

The tension between untainted memory and memory shaped by photographic images lies at the heart of this exhibition. In his latest works, artist Ronen Zien (b. 1990) returns to his home region in northern Israel. Zien, a native of Shfar’am and part of the Druze community, wanders through vibrant green fields near the Israel-Syria border. The northern border, scarred by significant geopolitical upheavals throughout the 20th century and current instability, serves as the canvas for his works. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Zien’s family has been divided by this border – a reality that has profoundly shaped his world.

Zien employs photography and video to examine the reliability of memory. Using green screen (or chroma-key) – a special effects technique borrowed from film and television that allows figures filmed against a green background to be embedded into different settings – he inserts himself into old photographs. Yet Zien goes further, adding another dimension to memory construction: he enters the photographs physically, bringing them to life through his footsteps. Like the bodily sensation of returning to a familiar place – when one’s feet seem to lead the way instinctively – he forges a deep connection with the terrain, finding the confidence to wander without predetermined knowledge or direction.

Zien’s works undermine the dominance of photographic documentation, offering a poetic and deeply personal alternative for revisiting distant places and times.