DISTANT SUFFERING XXXIII
i.d. of a deadly pattern
Art works Motivation Justification Accountability
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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....
www.hansovervliet.com
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 . . .
abstract
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 and in Israel in October – November 2023. With their very lamented deaths, the 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 website of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) provided the sad information . . .
art works
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motivation
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On December 29, 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 today, 77 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead: 70 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese. 16 Journalists were reported injured, 3 journalists were reported missing. 21 Journalists were reported arrested. Also multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members. 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, 2023: 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. Finally, the Western media almost never mention the victims of this type of violence by name. They are "terrorists," "youths," "women," "bystanders," "civilians," etc. In this particular outbreak of violence in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, the same media produced an endless stream of reports about the Israeli victims. These were and are being given an individual face, a name, a family, a city, family members, a personalized history, etc. In this respect you can and may look at DISTANT SUFFERING XXXIII | i.d. of a deadly pattern as a general j’accuse . . .
justification
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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 and then fixed as best I could with Montana Tech Varnish Spray - matt. 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 hans overvliet
accountability
On Friday afternoon, 29 December 2023 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 . . . On December 2023, the collecting on information of this project came to an end: I could no longer copy the data following December 29, 2023 | Jabr Abu Hadrous | journalist / reporter for Quds Al-Youm, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Nuseirat refugee camp, northern Gaza, along with seven members of his family, 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. Page 112 But apparently I too have some kind of breaking point . . .
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, Italy, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lebanon, Germany, the U.S.A. , France and Sweden. In 2023, his whole body of paper collages ( 1999 – 2012 ) joined Geert Verbeke’s renowned collection of collages and assemblages. 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 28-year old space for contemporary art: ruimteCAESUUR.
Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen. Theodor Adorno There is no right life in the wrong one.