Gazan &
Image
front: Mohamed Abusal | 21/02/'24
Trying to find artwork among the rubble in my childhood home, nothing saved or fine!
Mohamed Abusal | 26/01/'24
What does extermination mean?
That in an instant your first home is destroyed! The destruction of my home, my studio, my 32-year-old archive and a collection of Arabic art, the oldest of which was painted in 1969.
@orbi | Johan de Koning
Exhibition overview
Introduction | curator hans overvliet
art works
Mohamed Abusal
Raed Issa
Yasser Taher
Marwan Nassar
Maisara Baroud
Godelieve Smulders
Refaat Al-Areer | Hans Overvliet
JOHAN DE KONING
Through artworks by Gazan and Dutch artists, the exhibition Still Alive – voices from Gaza portrays the daily suffering of war victims in Gaza. How powerless people feel under daily shelling and bombing. Displaced, forced to move from tent camp to tent camp, condemned to disease and starvation: for us in Western Europe it is almost unimaginable. Artists from Gaza show us different images than the television newsreels. It touches us differently, but no less deeply.
What do we do?
This is also a pressing question for the church. Working group @ORBI - which aims to connect church and planet more closely - asked Hans Overvliet to bring works of art from Gaza to the Nieuwe Kerk via digital means (the only one still somewhat open).
Participating artists are: Marwan Nasser, Mohamed Abusal, Raed Issa and Yasser Thaher. New works by Maisara Baroud will also be on display; for some time now the work I'm still alive by Maisara can be seen under the gallery on the Groenmarkt.
Hans himself responds with kites made from newspaper reports in combination with a poem by Refaat alAreer. Godelieve Smulders shows impressive black and white drawings, depicting the dead floating above destroyed lives and ruins.
Still Alive opened September 8 in the New Church and was on view until November 1, 2024, Monday through Friday, 10:30 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Considerations Hans Overvliet
By way of introduction
By way of introduction
I am still alive is a series of messages by Japanese artist On Kawara. The series began with three telegramshe sent in 1969. For more than three decades - until 2000 - he sent nearly nine hundred of such telegrams to dozens of friends and acquaintances.
Why On Kawara stopped sending his reassuring words has never been known.
In 2023, Gazan artist Maisara Baroud started a series of works with the same title: I’m still alive. Unlike Kawara, the existence of Maisara and his family was and is seriously threatened daily by deadly danger.
In his words, “I no longer have a safe home for me and my small family. The missiles fell on my drawing studio (my own little world) and destroyed it. The airplanes destroyed all the future plans I had for my children. The steel bird killed my little cat Sarah and ate her soft flesh before the cat could pass on her seven souls to my children.”
“In an instant, I became a displaced person in cities that do not know me. I moved ten times in search of safeness for me and my children, far away from the heart of Gaza. I now live in southern Rafah, in a small house with 25 other people. Space has become scarce. Without clean water to drink and shower, without electricity, fuel or gas to cook. At the same time you have to look for survival and safety (which is lacking) for you and your family, and wait for the beginning of a new day after the end of a long night in Gaza full of planes, rockets and death.”
As of this writing - late August 2024 - more than 40,000 people have been killed and 100,000 injured in Gaza, at least half of them permanently disabled. That Maisara et al are still alive may be called a miracle. The fact that he and his fellow artists Marwan Nassar, Mohammed Abusal, Raed Issa, Yasser Thaher and many others attempt every day to express their threatened Yasser Thaher give to
Issa, Yasser Thaher and many others attempt every day to express their threatened existence shows a tremen-dous zest for life.
While art is actually the least important thing in times of ultimate threat, it is also the most important cry for freedom. Artistic freedom to express the culture you come from. To indicate to the Other that you exist. That the community you express exists and has a right to exist. Precisely at the moment when these voices are fighting for their survival, they are stripped of their stages. How to hear voices that are gagged by political actors beyond the reach of ordinary people? How to escape harmless symbolic political gestures? How to escape pre-assumptions?
At the Nieuwe Kerk in Middelburg, the work group @orbi is giving five Gazan artists a stage, and thus a voice, for a while. Their art work shows - sometimes deceptively poetically - the horrors of the context of where people currently live and work in Gaza. It tries to make us experience what is going on there. In Gaza, in the West Bank. It echoes at the same time the suffering in Ukraine and Lebanon, in Myanmar, Haiti, in El Salvador and Sudan. Places where fellow human beings struggle daily for survival.
Those people Marwan Nassar lets us look into their eyes. He provides his series of portraits with the connotation Scenes from daily life in the Gaza Strip. No faces !!! But feelings. Lévinas looks approvingly with Marwan. With his face à face he recognized the responsibility for and with the other comming face to face.
By offering artists from conflict zones a modest stage, we can start the conversation about our own possible contribution to making the atrocities stop. It is an initiative
-bution to making the atrocities stop. It is an initiative that attempts to reach beyond a non-committal, nothing but a self-soothing act on social media.
It is obvious to everyone that given the conditions in Gaza, there is no way we could get the original works here. So you see copies. By placing each art work in full size on a sheet of A2 format, one gets an honest and transparent view of the work. In doing so, we also create a calm and balanced exhibition image in which the work can take center stage. I like to mention that the Gazan artists trusted me blindly in my selection. One of the reasons is that they knew that I would never exhibit merely illustrations of a genocide, but would help focus also on the artistry of these artists. Of course, the theme of their work is obviously “Gaza,” but the transformation into visual art is and remains their autonomous activity, in their own unique and recognizable handwriting. From that amalgam of considerations I made the selection. Including the intrinsic existence of the work itself, both in the form of a sketch or the elaboration there of. By the physical presence of the works of these artists, we simultaneously affirm that they too exist. As fellow human beings. And that their voice, their cry sometimes, matters. Very much matters . . .
Thank you for your deep-rooted work Marwan Nassar, Mohamed Abusal, Raed Issa, Yasser Thaher and Maisata Baroud, I sincerely hope you live.
29 August 2024 | Hans Overvliet inspired by a text by Niek Hendrix
art works on display
MOHAMED ABUSAL
This is not a decor or beautiful architecture! This is pain mixed with false comfort. Manage to survive. To resist the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The final scene of the heroes of a movie that the whole world watched. They played their roles with all efficiency according to the wishes of the directors and scriptwriters. Every day a hundred heroes leave the scene, most of them brilliant children, and a hundred others take their place. The scenes go on until the desires of the devils are satisfied.
in my studio in a tent I paint a parallel reality.
GODELIEVE SMULDERS
Godelieve Smulders feels enormously affected by the war in Gaza and all the suffering taking place there. She grabs her drawing materials to express this. It becomes a quest. She can no longer cheerfully make quick drawings with ink and brush.
In charcoal, a long drawing process creates the nocturnal scenes in which the wandering dead are still present and observe the destroyed life on the spot.
If I must die
REFAAT AL-AREER | (1979 – 2023)
HANS OVERVLIET | three kites
Three kites (230 x 160 cm) white painted newsprint tails with 116 names of slain Gazan journalists.
Click here for the spoken versions of if I must die Dutch, German, Arabic and English.
Click here for the names of the journalists killed.
If I must die you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings.
(make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die let it bring hope let it bring a story
Colophon
Artists
From Gaza:
Marwan Nassar, Mohamed Abusal, Raed Issa, Yasser Thaher and Maisara Baroud
From the Netherlands:
Godelieve Smulders
Kites
Poem
Hans Overvliet
If I must die | Refaat Al-Areer (1979 – 2023)
Voices
Rezan Habash, Dani Ploegerand Hans Overvliet
Engineering
Sjef Hermans, edit Jochem Weststrate
W0rkgroup @orbi
Neeltje van Doorn, Sam Gideonse,
Opening op 8 september 2024
Poet | Rezan Habash
Musicians
leden van Broua | Wissem Ziadi & Ebeed Jeeb LaHtabb
Curator, layout exhibition and catalogues
Hans Overvliet
Thanks to
Willy van Houtum, Giel Louws
Sam de Visser en Ben Muis (construction cabinets)
All the volunteers of the New Church back side | Marwan Nasser
