photo cover | ©Abu Raya | 2015
www.hansovervliet.com
content
art works per district ex cursus | Lifta
exhibition in ruimteCAESUUR | Middelburg | june 16 – july 1st 2018
exhibition Kunsthal 45 | Den Helder | april 2025
justification acknowledgment
Do Not Believe Me If I Talked to You of War (excerpt)
Do not believe me if I talked to you of war, because when I spoke of blood, I was drinking coffee, when I spoke of graves, I was picking yellow daisies in Marj Ibn Amer, when I described the murderers, I was listening to my friends’ giggles, and when I wrote about a burnt theatre in Aleppo, I was standing before you in an air-conditioned one.
Asmaa Azaizeh
From an in 2017 as-yet-unnamed upcoming collection
Translated by Yasmine Haj
I am seven it is the day before our departure, the day my father gives me a notebook, and I tell him, this is where I’ll keep my country
Nathalie Handal
Defacing Palestine | the nakba 1948 | 2018 - 2025
Hans Overvliet spent 40 days - starting April 24, 2018 – charting 417 destroyed Palestinian villages / towns with the name, both in Latin and in Arabic script, the geographical location, the number of inhabitants in 1948 and a photo from the remains of that village / town. He poured that information into 417 obituaries and stored them in a steel archive cabinet.
Overvliet also made a video of his computer screen, which shows his search strategy, i.e. all the actions that led to each individual obituary.
In 2025 he made a video with all the black and white photos used in the obituaries. On behalf of an exhibition around 80 years of freedom in the Netherlands. Click here for that video.
The work is dedicated to Maryam [ 12 y. ] from Syria, who was in touch with my work on 09/03/’18
I will go now. Many children, half asleep and stumbling and falling as you hurry them from their houses at the hour of dawn. Houses that will be levelled like accusations in just a moment.
A father carries his children and rushes like a missile out of what will shortly be a pile of cement . . .
Othman Hussein
Excerpt from Camp Block 5 translated by Henry King and Sarah Irving
Echoes: A Historical Afterward
The reason is they’ve been killed
The truth is you’ve been too
The truth is you are now without a home
The reason is they’re in your home
The reason is they’ve convinced themselves you left
The truth is you only went to safety
The truth is they never let you back
The reason is they needed to protect their tribe
The truth is you are part of the same tribe
But no one speaks about that
The reasons is it’s easier to be a threat
How else can they justify the killing
Nathalie Handal
art works per district
A Picture of the House in Beit Jala
He has to return to shut that window, it isn’t entirely clear whether this is what he must do, things are no longer clear since he has lost them, and it seems a hole somewhere within him has opened up
Closing up the cracks has exhausted him mending the fences wiping the glass cleaning the edges and watching the dust that seems, since he has lost the things, to lure his memories into hoax and ruse. And from here his childhood appears as if it were a trick! inspecting the doors has fully exhausted him the window latches the condition of the plants and wiping the dust that has not ceased flowing into the rooms, on the beds, sheets, pots and on the picture frames on the walls
Since he has lost them he stays with friends who become fewer sleeps in their beds that become narrower while the dust gnaws at his memories “there”
…he must return to shut that window the upper story window which he often forgets at the end of the stairway that leads to the roof Since he has lost them he aimlessly walks and the day’s small purposes are also no longer clear.
Ghassan Zaqtan
From the collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah
Al-Quds / Jerusalem | Lifta
Noga Kadman | 2007
Umar Abu El-Bararri | 2008
Al-Quds / Jerusalem | Lifta
Umar Abu El-Bararri | 2008
Umar Abu El-Bararri | 2008
Al-Quds / Jerusalem | Lifta
Umar Abu El-Bararri | 2008
Umar Abu El-Bararri | 2008
DISTANT SUFFERING XVIII | defacing palestine
exhibition | work & opening
ruimteCAESUUR | Middelburg | June 16 – July 1st 2018
work conceived from april 24 till june 2, 2018:
1 metal archive box with drawer | brand / production year unknown 39,7 x 19,8 x 15,3 cm [ l., w., h. ] | handle 8,5 x 0,8 cm. 417 obituaries | 19, 1 cm. x 14,7 cm. [ l., w. ] black & white prints with 5% extra cyan on Staples inkjet printer paper, 170 g/m2, matt Canon PIXMA IMAX651 laptop Samsung notebook NP.R530 with a video of the making process [ www.vimeo.com/268949587 ] 2 consoles | MDF 18 mm. | Flexa white primer | Flexa white satin gloss for metal archive box: 90 x 28 x 60 cm. [ h., w., l. ] for laptop [ Samsung R530]: 90 x 36 x 23,3 cm. [ h., w., l. ]
text on inner wall | Details ( excerpt ) | Ghayath Almadhoun
Opening | Saturday, June 16, 2018 | opening speech by Ingrid Rollema
Kunsthal 45, Den Helder | April – May 2025
Completed with a video of the photos from the destoyed village used in the obituaries.
opening speech Ingrid Rollema | June 16
©2018 | Bert van Leerdam
Cross the Sea
A girl in Gaza speaks into a table microphone: Do you believe in infinity?
If so, what does it look like to you?
Not like a wall
Not like a soldier with a gun
Not like a ruined house bombed out of being Not like concrete wreckage of a school’s good hope a clinic’s best dream
In fact not like anything imposed upon you and your family thus far in your precious 13 years.
My infinity would be the never ending light you deserve every road opening up in front of you Soberly she nods her head.
In our time voices cross the sea easily but sense is still difficult to come by. Next girl’s question: Were you ever shy?
Naomi Shihab Nye
From the forthcoming collection Voices in the Air
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.
The oeuvre of Hans Overvliet (Leiden, 1952) moves between visual poetry and critical thinking. An important angle is the role of the media in their representation of (military) violence. Within the context of themes such as perception, memory and identity formation; since 2013, in the ongoing art series Distant Suffering*. In this work in progress Overvliet uses various media, symbols and codes and brings together dichotomies such as beauty and violence, refinement and cruelty, the sublime and the vulgar.
Aspects of power, politics, exclusion, censorship and the connection between artist, artwork and viewer infiltrate this multifaceted conceptual oeuvre.
As a reporter, Overvliet was an eyewitness to events in the Middle East in the 1980s. Naturally, these experiences resonate in Distant Suffering.
Elements of Distant Suffering found their way throughout Europe, the United States, South America and the Middle East. In 2023 his whole body of paper collages ( 1999 - 2012 ) joined the reputed collection of collages and assemblages the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In 2024 - 2025, the entire oeuvre of Distant Suffering was exhibited in the museum section of the Verbeke Foundation. All works will then subsequently be included in the permanent collection.
As part of his art praxis Hans is, together with his wife Willy van Houtum, founder and daily manager of ruimteCAESUUR, the 30-year-old space for contemporary art in Middelburg in the province of Zeeland.
*The title of distant suffering derives from the book Distant Suffering, Morality, Media and Politics by Luc Boltanski – indeed the brother of.
Justification
I told you repeatedly: Shiny poetry cannot Inject the war with a needle of reconciliation To the world, poetry is light as a feather. Until dawn I stayed stockpiling the opinion of poetry on papers, But the world does not recognize a status for poetry. When you violated the honour of my name I realized, nevertheless, You begrudged me my civilization.
Nasr Jamil Shaath
From the collection Because the Hat of Dust is Smoke
Temporal Disruption and Anti-Efficiency: Hans Overvliet’s critical media practice
( excerpt )
Dr. Dani Ploeger
The proliferation of digital news media over the past two decades has led to the distribution of more information at ever increasing speeds. Through news feeds, updates on the latest events all over the world are disseminated almost instantly and continuously. In The Administration of Fear (2012), Paul Virilio discusses the paradoxical consequences of this development. Instead of facilitating a more detailed assessment of events and thus trigger empathetic action on the side of the recipient, the fast sequence of detailed mediatizations of catastrophes and threats promotes a permanent state of fear. Whereas, in previous media eras, fear used to be ‘related to localized, identifiable events that were limited to a certain timeframe’, it has now increasingly become an environment that determines everyday life in the Global North.
These disruptions of the high-speed digital media landscape that occur during encounters with the finished work are not the only locus of Overvliet’s interventions though. A possibly even more radical interruption of what Virilio calls ‘the cult of speed’ takes place during the creation process. Instead of taking advantage of the latest software solutions to make image processing, graphic design, data collection and categorization faster and easier, Overvliet spends hundreds of hours conducting individual Google searches, and fiddling with the space bar and the return key of his old laptop to position images on a page, in this case, transferring all the information into an analogue obituary. Although to an outsider this may appear like a ‘waste of time’ or a sign of incomepetence, the inefficiency of Overvliet’s engagement with digital technologies is a significant component of his desire to undermine the ideological framework that surrounds digital media. Overvliet’s work process rejects the logic of process optimization and efficiency that usually accompanies everyday consumer technologies. The temporally disruptive quality of his work is also established by the often makeshift digital (and non-digital) processing of its materials.
References
Paul Virilio (2012). The Administration of Fear. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2017). A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the plan et acknowledgment
Ultimate gratitude to the people of www.palestineremembered.com www.badil.org/en www.zochrot.org/en www.villagesofpalestine.com www.wikipedia.org & [ amongst many other authors ]
Dr. Walid Khalidi
Robert Fisk
Lilie Chouliaraki
Worry Cocoon
For Samih al-Qasim
To live with what we are given –Graciously, as if our windows open wide as our neighbors’, as if there weren’t insult at every turn. How did you do that?
You sprang from the earth same way everyone does, from the soil of your parents, the small bed and hopeful song. Were pressed along through a century that didn’t honour your people, who washed their faces anyway, stitched the dresses, buttoned shirts.
How did you survive so much hurt and remain gracious, finding words to mark the shapes of grief, how did you believe, then and forever, something better could come your people’s way?
Naomi Shihab Nye
From the forthcoming collection Voices in the Air
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Kahlil Gibran
Lifta | region of Al-Quds / Jerusalem | januari 1948
april 24 - june 2, 2018 | january 24 - 25, 2025
www.hansovervliet.com
