i.d. of a shared cloud / wave / home is an attempt to reframe the vast and continuous flow of information about conflicts in distant places that reaches us through digital networked communication. This information is usually displayed transiently on screens. There is too much of it and it passes too quickly to enable intimate reflection and a sense of physical relation. Paul Virilio taught me by his book The Administration of Fear about the results. Fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides, the results of global warming; fear has become the world we live in.
A criminal, convicted of farude, assault cq rape became president of the United States in November 2024 with this frame . . .
The art work turns a collection of internet data into a lasting material structure. Reframing the data –also in a literal sense –it consists of three metal frames in which three sets of 1,000 Internet-sourced images are suspended on transparent sheets. The three "out-lines" of filing cabinets function as a transparent library for three topics that play a role in the background of every contemporary (mediated and mediatized) conversation: war, climate change and the ruins of physical structures and spaces, which result from the first two categories.
The images in the installation reflect these three categories: 1,000 explosions, 1,000 waves and 1,000 ruins, which are superimposed by open-source meta-data related to the images. The images of explosions and clouds are inscribed with reference codes to the military status of the area concerned, sourced the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency, Bethesda, MD, USA.
The waves are accompanied by formulas and models on climate change collected from institutes that, without corporate money, conduct research into climate change; the causes and consequences thereof.
The images of ruins are superimposed by maps of national libraries of some 50 countries, sent to me during an earlier project (1996) that engaged with the loss of libraries as a physical source of ( concentrating ) knowledge, information and meeting and -in some cases -outright censorship.
The relevance of this data super imposed on these images in terms of the new meanings it might generate, is the juxtapositions between image and model, between the seemingly harmless metadata hidden beneath the image. In nowadays media the difference between the image itself and the model of the image disappears; the simulacra of Beaudrillard are omnipotent present and produce –if we don’t change - more of the same: nullité -zeroness.
Context
The materialisation and connection to our physical experiences of all hose images is quite a challenge. Jean Baudrillard suggests that we have entered a fundamental process regarding our perception of the image: ‘it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum."
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, states inLiquid Modernitythat everything is temporary, transient or changeable. He also notes that people have never communicated so much before, without any goal or result. For Bauman, the (social) media are like a huge house full of mirrors. In this house we do meet people, but we do not enter into dialogue. There are differrences of opinion, but no real, constructive debate. This creates the illusion of connection with others when this is not actually there.
In Bauman's "fluid culture", insecure relationships, or love without a face and without commit-ment, prevail. This fluid culture lives on waves of feelings and ideas that may be there today, but will disappear tomorrow at the latest. It amuses people but at the same time keeps us un-der control. Baudrillard's society of spectacles with its nullité is imperative. It destroys context, history, consistent content, distorts realities.
DISTANT SUFFERING (work series)
This work is part of the DISTANT SUFFERING PROJECT (2013 - ); please see page 30.
exhibition images
DISTANT SUFFERING VII – VIII – IX
i.d. of a shared cloud / wave / home - 2015
work
3 ‘out-lines’ of filing cabinets, each 134 cm. x 49,5 cm. x 71 cm. [ h x w x d ]
material
weathering steel 2x [ 10 x 10 mm.] 1x [ 12 x 12 mm.], wooden bars 1 x 1 cm., Nobo OHP Transparency Film, sided acid-free tape
filled with
1,000 images of explosions and ‘holiday clouds’ on 50 sheets codes super imposed on the images: unique location positioning from a military open source website;
1,000 images of waves | statistics Global Warming on 50 sheets;
1,000 images of destroyed houses | ground plans in the images: send to me - in 1996 on my request from and of 72 national libraries The World Library Art Project on 50 sheets.
Photoprints 6 x 9 x 1 cm on 300 grs. Plano on 1,5 mm Whitefix with acid-free adhesive of cleaned statistics regarding global warming super imposed on seas from all over the world. The work is also a statement of solidarity to the people in the region of Valencia who were so severely affected by natural disasters in October / November 2024.
Middelburg, Sunday 03/11/2024
individual works
DISTANT SUFFERING IX i.d. of a shared home
On January 1, 1996, I mailed letters to all national libraries of the then U.N. recognized countries asking them to send me the architectural drawing of that country's respective national library. This under the title WORLD ART LIBRARY PROJECT.
Inspiration was the still experienced love for the word and the book. Where in my experience the national library - for better and for worse - is the carrier in all respects.
About fifty libraries responded including a number of countries that did not have a national library. Of these, I used their logo in the progression. In 1998, I mounted the architectural drawings on steel cabinet shelves of 99 x 40 x 2 cm. silk-screened. Always I had the idea that this was not the final form.
Now, after all these years, the final form falls to me: in DISTANT
SUFFERING IX
| I.D. OF A SHARED HOME, I combine 1,000 images of destruction by human action in the format of a passport photo with scans of details of floor plans. To avoid any kind of hierarchy, I put all the details in one color: blue.
DISTANT SUFFERING VII – VIII – IX
i.d. of a shared cloud / wave / home examples of super imposed information
Aagtekerke | 1945
-2140125 | -2969241 | 31UET3582411116
Unique Feature Identifier: -2140125
Unique Name Identifier: -2969241
Military Grid Reference System coordinates: 31UET3582411116
Aden | 2015 -3189087 | -4507767 | 38PMV8739609369
Unique Feature Identifier: -3189087
Unique Name Identifier: -4507767
Military Grid Reference System coordinates: 38PMV8739609369
Aleppo -2542538 | -3495143 | 37SCV1973385798
Unique Feature Identifier: -2541858
Unique Name Identifier: -3483931
Military Grid Reference System coordinates: 37SCV1973385798
Military Grid Reference System coordinates: 31UFT5348157833
D
DISTANT SUFFERING IX | I.D. OF A SHARED H
Yemen | Sana’a
Finland National Library
Syria | Abayan
Jamaica National Library
Syria | Aleppo
Botswana National Library
Gaza | Gaza City
Moldova
National Library
Libanon | Beiruth
Seychellen
National Library
Irak | Fallujah
Trinidad & Tobego
National Library
België | Doel
Canada National Library
Irak | Mosul
Sri Lanka National Library
Afghanistan | Kabul
Spanje
National Library
Syria | Kobani
Kenya National Library
Yemen | Aden
U.S.A.
National Library
Irak | Bagdad
Kazachstan National Library
Holland | Middelburg
Israël
National Library
Syria | Crac des Chevaliers
Estionia
National Library
Oekraïne | Donest’k
Nigeria National Library
Syrië | Homs
Madagascar National Library
Irak | Raqqa
Nicaragua National Library
Holland | Rotterdam
Peru
National Library
DISTANT SUFFERING the project
Hans Overvliet | DISTANT SUFFERING
W.F.T. van Houtum
Since 2013, by means of the ongoing art-series DISTANT SUFFERING, the Dutch artist Hans Overvliet investigates the role of the media in their representation of (military) violence. This, in the context of themes as perception, memory and identity formation.
Overvliet uses a various range of media, symbols and codes, bringing together dichotomies like beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, the sublime and the vulgar.
As a reporter, Overvliet was an eyewitness to the events in the Middle East during the 1980s. Of course these experiences resonate in DISTANT SUFFERING. So aspects of power, politics, exclusion, censorship and the connection between artist, artwork and viewer infiltrate his multifaceted conceptual oeuvre.
Martha Jager, curator Vleeshal in Middelburg about the oeuvre: The dedication to art as a relational verb is central to Overvliet's work. On the one hand, the balance between poetry and criticism is special, so that the work never becomes bitter or pedantic, while at the same time the dialogue with the viewer is actively maintained. It is a tender form of activism that moves and urges action and also continuously questions the role of art.
Elements of distant suffering were exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Pakistan, England, France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Albania, Germany, Lebanon, the U.S.A., Brazil, Argentina and Sweden.
In 2023, his whole body of paper collages ( 1999 – 2012 ) joined Geert Verbeke’s re-nowned collection of collages and assemblages.
In 2024 - 2025 the whole oeuvre of distant suffering was exhibited in the museum part of the Verbeke Foundation. All the work will then be included in the permanent collection. As is this artwork . . .
Next to his art-work he is, together with his wife Willy van Houtum, the founder and every day guardian of ruimteCAESUUR, the 29-year old space for contemporary art in Middelburg in the province of Zeeland.
