studio address | Dreesstraat 2, Vlissingen www.hansovervliet.com curiositas@zeelandnet.nl
M. & cross #2 | Middelburg Saturday, March 17, 2018
In the studio complex in Vlissingen in the Netherlands, where my studio is situated, an artwork of mine is located on an intermediate platform of the stairwell. From ground level, five steps lie between you and that work. It measures 144 x 244 centimetres.
The artwork is an enlargement of a paper collage, printed on Perspex; different images are cut out horizontally and pasted back and thus interlock into a story with each other. Indeed it is the Image on the right.
A group of twelve year old children of a primary school is visiting the complex in the context of an art education project.
A head scarfed girl, called M., sees the artwork and freezes in her movement. And she looks. After some time she takes the five steps up. Now she is standing still on the intermediate platform.
And looks. Then she slowly walks forward. Somewhere in the jumble of images she has discovered the head scarfed girl. That girl stands with her arms wide spread amidst the rubble of a street somewhere in Syria. The iconic picture of a prisoner in the Abu Ghraib Prison is imminent.
Our girl now touches the image almost with her nose; the artwork towering above her. Then she moves very, very slowly her hands together until her fingertips touch each other as if she was holding a sphere. Then her hands include the girl's head in the collage.
She is standing there, her hands around the head of the other head scarfed girl. Eye in eye. Face à face . . .
SUFFERING
work
VI | i.d.ofasharedkey#1– 2015 | -
exhibit practice in progress
selection from in total 215 old, cleaned tin cans an imprint of a key, pressed into plaster in the shape of a gold bar
exhibitions
Art Gouda | het Weeshuis - 2016
Theater De Fransche School | Culemborg - 2016
Kunstpodium ‘T’ | Tilburg | Steal like an Artist! - 2020
curated by Lost Painters | Niek Hendrix
Luxfer Open Space | Česká Skalice | Czech Republic - 2021
Part of the Lípa Art Collection | Prague | Czech Republic - 2022
curated by Roel van der Linden
EEJ! | 14 HUBSA art houses in an art street | Goes - 2023
curated by r André Smits
Kulturverein Projektraum-bahnhof25 | Kleve | Germany – 2023
Verbeke Foundation | Kemzeke | Belgium | 2024 -2025
Palestinian refugees whom I met from the early eighties, to the present day keep up the keys of their homes from which they were expelled from 1948 on by the state of Israel. The current generation Palestinians carries all kinds of keys and key chains as jewellery.
In 1991, for the first time I read the book Pity the Nation, Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk*. The chapter The Keys of Palestine** associating me with my own experiences, I always remembered.
The artwork consists of 215 biscuit tins, collected in Zeeland and Belgium over the course of one and a half year. I removed the enamel and / or paint of every can. Inside every tin there is a print of the same key, pressed into plaster in the shape of a gold bar. The can functions also as a container of the memories of my own childhood, storing my secret treasures. At the same time is is the metaphor of the forgotten memory [with forgotten postcards, far forgotten coins from countries visited, that special piece of rope, that shell . . ., etc.] that everybody had put away under the bed.
Each exhibition image is determined in situ.
* Pity the Nation | Robert Fisk | Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN 978-0-19-280130-2 | 1990
** This chapter can be read on http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-3/fisk.htm
| October 5, 2023
Belgium | November 23, 2025
23, 2025
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Hans Overvliet | DISTANT SUFFERING
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., Brasil, Argentina and Sweden.
In 2023, his whole body of paper collages ( 1999 – 2012 ) joined Geert Verbeke’s renowned 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.
Hans Overvliet was born in Leiden in 1952; he lives in Middelburg and works in Vlissingen, both in the province of Zeeland in the South-West of the Netherlands.
Next to his art-work he is, together with his wife Willy van Houtum, the founder and every day guardian of the 30-year old space for contemporary art: ruimteCAESUUR.
Here you’ll find his extended portfolio.
