Huis Marseille exhibited Jacqueline Hassink’s photo project Mindscapes in 2003, and this first-ever large-scale retrospective of her work was followed by The Power Show in 2008. While these two exhibitions took very different approaches to subject and form, they nevertheless had a strong thematic affinity: Hassink searches for the loci of power. For instance, she has photographed bureaus and meeting room tables in the offices of multinationals such as Shell. The title of her first photobook, in 1996, was The Table of Power. In View, Kyoto, however, she depicts the opposite: places of peace and contemplation.
Hassink first travelled to Kyoto in 2001. Between 2004 and 2014 she photographed the interiors and gardens of Buddhist temples, in all seasons. The series is a study of space and nature, and of the interplay between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The photobook View, Kyoto, published in 2014, has three parts. In the first, Hassink examines the indistinct border between private and public space by photographing the garden from inside the temple; in the second she concentrates on the interiors, and in the third on the gardens. ‘In Buddhism the temple is seen as the human realm, whereas the garden represents the realm of the Buddha. The veranda is the line that separates these two worlds. Thisseparation is temporary, and eventually through meditation the Buddha (nature) and humans become one,’ explains Hassink in the book. Because Buddhist temples have no windows, the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ flow into one another, creating a harmonic whole.
In the Garden House, three works by Hassink are on display which exude the same tranquillity, intensity and concentration as can be seen in the work of the Japanese photographers in A Beautiful Moment.