In His Show “Walking Into,” Ronen Zien Dreams About Crossing Borders

Ronen Zien dreams about crossing over. In his moving works the artist, born in the Arab city of Shefa Amr in northern Israel, traverses time, space, memory, and even borders—conjuring in images what he can only imagine doing in reality.

Zien walks up a hill on a summer morning in the early 1990s, toward a two-year-old version of himself sitting under a parasol. In this life-size video work (Walking Into, 2024), now installed at the entrance to his solo exhibition of the same name at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Zien strolls into a faded family photograph and invites us to imagine joining him.

“The idea of going back in time and walking in photos from your own childhood, it charms us all,” exhibition curator Sophia Berry told ARTnews. “It was very important to him that this be something universal.”

The artist’s father took the source photo for Walking Into sometime around 1993. Zien’s family, like others in the Druze community, is divided by the Israel–Syria border and for decades had no phone lines, postal services, or other means of direct communication. (The Druze are an Arabic-speaking ethnoreligious community whose traditions emphasizing spiritual purity date back to the 11th century; most live in Syria and Lebanon, though roughly 150,000 live in Israel.) To stay in touch, families would arrange times to meet on hills on either side of the border, greeting each other with megaphones and white handkerchiefs. The area, near the Druze town of Majdal Shams in northern Israel, was dubbed “the Shouting Hill.”

Using chroma key (aka green screen) technology, Zien inserted himself into this snapshot from a small family album, which is also included in the exhibition. Zien revels in the magic of photography and describes having a “gluttony for the medium,” exploring its many forms. He uses a range of formats—from cyanotype to video—to animate the impossible and test the reliability of memory, or memory as shaped by photographs.

“I don’t remember anything. What I remember is actually based on the photographs, because we always saw them,” says Zien about his recollections of the Shouting Hill. “That’s also part of the story that I’m always trying to ask about: What are the strings that connect a photograph and a memory? How does memory influence a photograph, and how does a photograph influence the ability to remember?”

Across from Walking Into, a video image of Zien ambles into another panorama of the past—this one drawn from an entirely different album and set in the foothills of Mount Hermon, his family’s ancestral home. Searching for historic photos of the Shouting Hill back when Zien’s grandfather and others could walk around that area unencumbered by borders, he and Berry found a print by the 19th-century French photographer Félix Bonfils in the museum’s permanent collection.

Using Bonfils’s General View of Kefr-Haour and Mount Hermon and chroma key technology, Zien traverses the open fields of mid to late 19th-century Syria. The sepia-toned photograph isn’t linked to a memory of his own but rather to one that his grandfather, Salah, may have once had; Zien summons it with the magic wand of photographic techniques past and present.

Though other people’s stories recur in Zien’s work, in this exhibition he delves deeper than before into his own history. The opportunity to take this closer look came in the summer of 2023 when he received the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist, an award that includes a grant and solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He created all but two of the works in the exhibition in the six months before its February 2025 opening, against the backdrop of the current war that brought renewed tension to the border Zien revisits. (The exceptions are My Father and Mother, a 2019 inkjet print of two fabric-draped olive trees, framed like a portrait, and a cyanotype of his mother in traditional dress.)

The only exhibited works that don’t connect to Zien’s family are a series of cyanotypes of the frequent Hezbollah missile interceptions, visible from the artist’s home.“Every so often he would hear [it],” recalls Berry of the soundtrack that accompanied Zien’s work. “I couldn’t go to his studio, and he didn’t want to come here because he didn’t want to leave his family. So he photographed it because he didn’t know what else to do with it.”

Another work that pulls viewers back to the current moment is Green Screen (2024), a closed-circuit camera that visually places visitors at the Israel–Syria border using a photograph Zien took at the security fence (almost exactly where his father photographed the Syrian Shouting Hill in the 1990s). Viewers walking freely in the gallery are suddenly confronted with a blockade and the restrictions that the border signifies.

That border has changed since Zien photographed it last year. A gate was added, and in mid-March nearly 100 Druze sheikhs from Syrian towns (occupied by Israel since the fall of the Assad regime) crossed through it into Israel for the first such visit in more than 50 years. Zien’s father was present for both days of the event; Zien was there on the second day. It wasn’t his first time greeting members of his community from the other side, but this time he could remember it without the help of a photograph. Long-separated family members were reunited during this visit, and Zien says that for the Druze community, it was more festive than a holiday.

“It was important to me [to be there], and actually I missed a photographic moment. Right at the Shouting Hill, right near the fence that’s in the gallery, that’s where the buses came in,” Zien relates. “It’s the same fence.”

“But for me, it’s when will I be there? To cross the border myself, and not just them, because I really love to dream that I’m crossing the border on foot, with my camera. And I want this border not to exist, or at least for it to have a gate,” Zien says. “I’m of course excited by the idea of meeting my family there someday. But I’m more moved by the idea of just walking in that field, in that place. I’ll reach them eventually; they’re waiting for me. But just that freedom of walking in a place that I never imagined I’d reach.”