23 | hans overvliet | DISTANT SUFFERING XXXIII | i.d. of a deadly pattern
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXIII i.d. of a deadly pattern 2023 - 2025
Facebook | December 10, 2023 | Jen GosséBelgium
Social engagement, daring to speak out about what surrounds us is something I often find lacking in contemporary art.
Not here, where my dear friend Hans Overvliet is gently forcing our noses into the shame of Gaza. How inappropriate in Christmas tree time, how damnably necessary inappropriate....
Dedicated to Shireen Abu Akleh the Palestinian/American journalist.
‘Armed’ with a camera and a pen, Shireen was murdered by the occupation army of the apartheid regime of Israel on May 11, 2022 in Jenin. Her murderer is still at large . . .
i.d. of a deadly pattern attempts to keep alive the memory of the journalists who were brutally killed while trying to cover the massacres in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Israel in October 2023 – January 2025. With their very lamented deaths, the 205 voices* of the victims are also silenced and, at the same time, most of the crimes - in particular those which the Palestinian people endured - are relegated to obscurity.
The first serie was exhibited in the winterexhibition of the Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke, Belgium, 2024 - 2025. About that first series, Omroep Zeeland journalist Ilja Tuning made a short but loving portrait.
For the second version, I printed all the documents from the first series in blue and supplemented them with the journalists and media people unfortunately killed in the meantime; also in blue.
This version was developed for Kunsthal 45 in Den Helder, tob e displayed in an exhibition commemorating eighty years of freedom in the Netherlands in 2025. Unfortunately, I had to cancel for that exhibition because of irreconcilable differences in content with the curator.
On November 25, 2023, the website of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) read: The Israel-Gaza war has taken a severe toll on journalists since Hamas launched its unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7 and Israel declared war on the militant Palestinian group, launching strikes on the blockaded Gaza Strip. CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992. ( . . . )
As of November 25, preliminary investigations of several outlets showed at least 52 journalists and media workers were among the more than 16,000 killed since the war began on October 7with some 14,800 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank and 1,200 deaths in Israel. Here is an interactive map documenting all killed journalists in this period.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told Reuters and Agence France Press news agencies that it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in the Gaza Strip, after they had sought assurances that their journalists would not be targeted by Israeli strikes, Reuters reported on October 27. Journalists in Gaza face particularly high risks as they try to cover the conflict in the face of an Israeli ground assault on Gaza City, devastating Israeli airstrikes, disrupted communications, and extensive power outages.
DISTANT
SUFFERING XXXIII | i.d. of a deadly pattern attempts to be a memorial to the journalists who were killed while trying to do their jobs.
As Hannah Arendt taught me, people may be the subject of their own life story, they play and undergo it, but they are strictly speaking never the author of it. This is because any self-disclosure is dependent on others, each with their own life story. To be seen and heard requires a public sphere that can only thrive through a multiplicity and variety of diverse stories and perspectives.
When those in power continue to succeed in eliminating the most important story-tellers ‘on the ground’journalists - actual events and the experiences of those involved and affected by these events will remain in the dark and will never contribute to possible memory formation. Hence, places of memory always contain acts of forgetting, neglect and silencing to justify contemporary social relations. Thus, the silencing of memory are vital for the legitimation of state politics, as well as for the normalization of the inherent violence and exploitation of neoliberalisme.
Memorial material has the power to bind communities, societies and nations in the present. Yet it can also operate as sites of resistance or points of contestation. Therefore, ownership of social memory inevitably comes around to questions of domination and the uneven access to a society’s political and economic resources.
In this respect you can and may read DISTANT SUFFERING XXXIII | i.d. of a deadly pattern as a general j’accuse . . .
The title of the project refers to a CPJ report that you can find here.
justification
The names and dates of the deceased journalists were taken from the website of the Committee of Protecting Journalists - CPJ.
The names are printed in the letter Times New Roman, a font that is still used as the base letter in many news organizations.
The A4 prints on 300 grs. Plano Superior, printer Canon TS7000 series, were treated with various concentrations of the fungicide HG Mold Remover.
The first serie then was fixated as best I could with Montana Tech Varnish Spray - matt.
The second serie I kept how it was after the sparting.
There is a reasonable chance that in the foreseeable future the names will disappear entirely. Then the work as an art piece will connect with an early work by one of my inspirations. i.e. That of Ulay: Fototot (Photo Death) which I saw at de Appel in Amsterdam in 1976 and a work of myself: i.d. of a shared bullet.
In that case, I sincerely hope that its repercussion - this catalogue - has a slightly longer life, but that above all the memory of people who saw the work ensures that the journalists in question are not forgotten and that the fruits of their labeur continue to contribute to the liberation of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
Finally, a very personal note.
On November 9, 2023 at 6 a.m., H. v. L. died in a hospice in C., 68 years old. H. was a formidable woman with whom I have been deep befriended since 1978.
The grief is great, consolation for her husband and my friend P. is almost unattainable.
The realization that a few hours' flight from here, on the shores of Mediterranean Sea at this very moment, on November 10, 2023 - more than 12,000 people, among them disproportionately enormous numbers of children - have been and are being destroyed by ruthless violence, makes that grief all the more pregnant and the feeling of helplessness that the effects of the massacres will ever turn for the better, immeasurably great.
Middelburg, November 10, 2023 – February 22, 2025 hans overvliet
accountability
On Monday afternoon, 27 November around a quarter to six, it was over. The realisation that all these people had been killed while doing their extremely necessary work: reporting on war crimes, most of them committed on civilians by a standing army, i.e. that of the colonising apartheid state of Israel became simply too much.
All the killed journalists themselves being the children of their parents. The pain of all their own children and parents left behind, all those relatives, all those friends and acquaintances, yes, indeed all those neighbours.
And because I am also one of these neigbours, I too lost too many artist & journalist friends. Some of whom I know for more than three decades . . .
So on Monday afternoon, 27 November 2023, the collecting on information of this project came to an end: I could no longer copy the data following 'November 23, 2023 | Mohamed Mouin Ayyash | killed in Gaza | journalist for Roya News, Wafa from the CPJ-site into this modest memorial.
The grief for so much destroyed talent, life, hope, future and so on is too much. I realise, of course, that this is an extremely luxurious position and has nothing to do with the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. But apparently I too have some kind of breaking point . . .
January 9, 2025 for the exhibition in Den Helder, I started with the second serie. Since this work had a brother/sister in the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium, I didn't want to make a twin, so I used dark blue; the closest to Berlin Blue. The total amount of murdered journalists on January 15, 2025 is 205*
The death toll in the first nine months of the war, from October 2023 to mid-2024, was probably 41 percent higher than Palestinian authorities disclosed, academics investigated. The Lancet researchers estimated that in the first nine months, the death toll in Gaza had to have been 64,260**.
In the corporate media on January 15, 2025 circulated the figure of about 48,000 people killed, 110, 000 people wounded and some 11,000 people missing. You'll hopefully excuse me for not extrapolating that numbers with that 41 percent.
According to – amongst other sources – The Middle east Monitor, the The Palestine Media Forum and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Click here for the PDF from The lancet
DISTANT SUFFERING the project
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.
Hans Overvliet | DISTANT SUFFERING
The oeuvre of Hans Overvliet (Leiden, 1952) moves between visual poetry and critical observation. 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.
Besides his work, 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.
thanks
Willy, for support in this arduous work. She handled the backs of the prints; Geert Verbeke and the curator of the Verbeke Foundation for the supprt and trust; Giel for the suggestions, support and the loan of his studio; Ilja Tuning of Omroep Zeeland for the beautiful portrait .
