In loving memory of Dorgham Quraiqi
In the early morning of March 18, 2025 our dear friend, colleague the artist Dorgham Quraiqi was killed, together with his family in Shejaiya during the bombings on Gaza. His travelling cinema, his swimming pools and theatre shows made many thousands of displaced children smile over the last 1,5 years. A wonderful and talented person is no more. We are in deep, deep mourning. May his soul rest in peace.
cover page
Vlissingen, Art Fair Pop-up the Machine
October 25, 2024 | Photo Courtesy of ©Giel Louws
hans overvliet
curiositas@zeelandnet.nl
www.hansovervliet.com
Make something. Find a use for it.
AND / OR Invent a function.
Find an object.
One thing working one way
Another thing working another way.
One thing working different ways at different times. Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
" " " " " "
Jasper Johns
1965 | in Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing
the rage of the bullet | 1995 corten steel 3 mm, bee wax | 61 x 61 x 3 cm
SUFFERING XXI | i.d. of a shared ice bullet
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXX | i.d. of an artist's video portrait
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXXV | i.d. of shared a gold-plated bullet
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXXVI | i.d. of the shared tale of a bullet (
DISTANT SUFFERING XXI
| i.d. of a shared ice bullet
Ice bullets, made using a mold, similar to a cartridge from an AK-47 the most widely produced semi-automatic weapon in the world. The ice bullets are contained in a small glass tube, sealed with a cork.
Once the bullet leaves the freezer, the melting process begins. The residue - water - will eventually evaporate. memory of the conversation that took place during the melting is the only ‘thing’ that remains. video of the time laps page 06
Material
Mold ‘hot Bullet Shape Mode’ from Etsy, Hong Kong
061207 1 H14-03-020 1 PL191 129 02 187 A.
Small bottles from Etsy, Hong Kong; High borosilicate glass and cork, volume: 85 oz (25ml), 90 mm x 20 mm; opening: about 13 mm.
Severin GB 8882 - fridge | Steel console 110 x 60 x 60 cm | powder coated
Time-laps video
Production | special thanks to Willy van Houtum | research, implementation, production, primal time-lapse video ( Skalice, Czech Republic, 2021 )
Loek Overvliet | console fridge
Jochem Weststrate | time-laps video and stills ( Vlissingen, 2024 )
Photos
Willy van Houtum, Roman RejholdCZ, Rikard FåhraeusSE , Azumi OkabeJP , Ivan van de CapelleBE , Ruben HordijkNL/SE, Giel Louws, Dirk KnickhoffBRD
Sylvia Hubrouck
Open Space |
SkaliceCZE | June 11, 2022
Juxtapose Art Fair | AarhusDNK | August 20 – 22, 2021
ruimteCAESUUR / Studio44SWE | December 6, 2021 - January 7, 2022
BruggeBE | April 21 – May 29, 2022
Supermarket Art Fair | StockholmSWE | May 25 – May 29, 2022
| Långholmen | StockholmSWE | June 4 – 19, 2022
kunstverein bahnhof25 | KleveBRD | November 11 – December 3, 2023
Verbeke Foundation | KemzekeBE | November 17, 2024 – April 23, 2025
Exhibitions | special thanks to Roman Rejhold and Kate Štroblová curators for Luxfer Open Space | Czech Republic
Sasha Rose Richter | Pamela Grombacher | Jacob Juhl | Cecilie Bernts curators for Juxtapose Art Fair | Aarhus | Denmark
Rikard Fåhraeus | curator for team Studio44 | Stockholm | Sweden
teamCAESUUR | Middelburg | the Netherlands
Wilfried Agricola de Cologne and Yarina Butkowska curators The New Museum of Networked Art
Jan Verhaeghe | curator for CultuurCentrum Brugge | Bruges | Belgium
Kit Hill | curator for DiEM25 / DiEm Gallery – website
Alice Máselníková | Andreas Ribbung
creative Directors Supermarket Independent Art Fair Stockholm | Sweden
Rikard Fåhraeus and team
The artist-house Slipvillan on Långholmen | Stockholm | Sweden
Leni van den Berge | owner of de roofprintpers | Middelburg | the Netherlands
Dirk D. Knickhoff, Elisabeth Schink, Ulrike E.W. Scholder | board & curators
Kunstverein projektraum-bahnhof25 | Kleve | Germany
Marie Verboven, Geert Verbeke | Verbeke Foundation | Kemzeke | Belgium
Financial support
Supermarket Independent Art FairSweden: Mondrian Fund
Luxfer OpenSpace Czech Republic and Juxtapose Art Fair AarhusDenmark; SBKM / Vleeshal
SlipvillanSweden: Kulturrådet | Region StockholmSweden
Kunstverein projektraum-bahnof25 | KleveGermany: SBKM / Vleeshal
DISTANT SUFFERING XXI
i.d. of a shared ice bullet
Reflecting on the conversations during the slow melting of i.d. of a shared ice bullet, Adorno comes to mind. He too taught me to look at art in a layered, but above all, in a political way. At the roles of the art producer, the art consumer, and all entities that move in between, the ideological angles in art history, etc.
All this of course within the economic paradigm of the ruling class.
Adorno set me on the content of my artistic path with “Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which contitouted as "Hot Bullet Shape Mode."
course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings.”1
I also felt almost personally supported by him: Theodor Adorno perhaps came the closest to making the ultimate defence of l'art pour l'art by claiming that “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. It criticizes society by merely existing.”2 (italic h.o.)
Back to the beautiful conversations during the melting. My art work i.d. of a shared ice bullet consists of a frozen bullet in a small bottle provided with a cork and a label carrying the title. The bullet is from an AK-47 Kalashnikov. of
bullet is made with the aid of a mold resembling the cartridge case of an AK-47 Kalashnikov, the most massproduces assault rifle on the planet. The image of this gun is portrayed in many documentations of war. The bullet, one rarely sees. The results on the other hand . . .
the first time solo in June 2021 in Luxfer Open Space in Česká Skalice, the Czech Republic. As an opening session.
During the Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, Denmark, for the first time we – my wife Willy and I - handed people the art work one on one. We let the melting decide about the time frame: it guided the conversation almost like an hourglass.
Immediately after the little bottle with the frozen bullet leaves the freezer, the ‘decay’ starts: the bullet begins to melt. It melts from a metaphor of a lifethreatening object – a bullet - into a life creating element: water.
I presented i.d. of a shared ice bullet for the first time in June 2021 in Luxfer
The people who thawed the bottle in their hands all became emotional after a very short time. First of all they considered the work as beautiful and than –sometimes at a deep personal level –meaningful. Some wanted to stop the process by putting the bottle back into the fridge, others photographed the the freezer, others
ongoing process during our conversation, some tried to minimize skin contact to slow down the melting process. Many lamented that the work confronted them with their own vulnerability in a way almost how Adorno was quoted by Byung-Chul Han in his 'Saving beauty': “We should return to the kind of beauty that makes us (…) in Theodor Adorno’s terms, realizing our own finitude.”3
self – is actually the only one who has seen the art work in an "original" state. The rest of the planet has to trust that the "story" is based in reality, even in truth, that this water was once an ice bullet.
So the only “realistic” image is anchored in the owners memory as long as she / he / x remembers that.
In many cases, the conversation half way down focused on the preliminary result: a small glass bottle with a label and a cork with a little water in it.
The owner – apart from the artist himself – is actually the only one who has
“Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force invalidating the actual prevailing bourgeois values, namely by shifting the locus of the individual’s realization from the domain of the performance principle and the inner resources of the human being: pas-
sion, imagination, conscience.”4
On a personal level, the specific work also shows the physical dynamics of my physical present; me being 72 years old and survived cancer, be it with a lot of negative side effects. The vulnerability and transience of myself and others around me are quite realistic facts in my life.
So part of the work of course is shaping my own finitude. An experience I share with all those wonderful people I had the privilege to meet while melting the ice bullet under the watchful eye of Adorno . . .
One of the melted bullets accompanied Azumi Okabe to Niigata City, Japan . . .
Courtesy photo 2022 ©Azumi Okabe
1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (New York: Columbia UP, 1974) p. 80
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1997) p. 225 – p. 226
3 Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, (Polity, 2018) p. 22 – p. 24
4 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon, 1978) p. 4 – p. 5
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXX
i.d. of an artist's video portrait | 2024 utterly endlessly repurposed naive incantation gesture
co-production Hans Overvliet & Jochem Weststrate the primal video ( loop without words ) the Dutch video ( in production ) the Engish spoken video ( in production)
page 20
DISTANT SUFFERING XXXXV
i.d. of a shared gold-plated bullet triptych | studio, study 2025
gold plated ceramic bullet, silk roses, blue velvet, classic bell jar 50 cm Ø | 22 cm
gold plated ceramic bullet, silk lilies, blue velvet, classic bell jar 50 cm Ø | 22 cm
gold plated ceramic bullet, nest of a blue tit from our garden, unhatched egg, eggshell, blue velvet, classic bell jar 70 cm Ø | 30 cm three consoles 30 x 30 x 110 cm | matt white finish
24
DISTANT SUFFERING
i.d. of the shared tale of a bullet ( difference and repetition )
WORK IN PROGRESS
1.000+ bullets, 113 mm x 15 mm Ø casted with white porcelain plaster page 32
This part of the project is bringing together the 1000+ porcelain-plaster bullets in invisibly connected perforated sheets of 60 x 40 cm that hang - i.e. in one row - at a height of about 2.5 - 3 metres. The bullets hang out of the perforated holes pointing downwards; indeed, a rain of bullets.
A rain that completely undermines their destructive potential while revealing their metaphorical potential; that of mass destruction. The image of allied military cemeteries is not far away either. Thus, perhaps a transformation from an object of violence to an object of reflection and memory is taking place.
The photographs are, of course, a trial version of an extremely small part of the final elaboration.
He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Gay Science, 1882
Every act of destruction is also an act of creation.
To destroy is to open up a space, to clear a path for something new.
Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition, 1968
To say something about my motivation regarding this transition of the bullet, I would like to start with the French philosopher Bataille.
Georges Bataille reflected on concepts of excess, transgression in the context of the limits of human existence. His work often revolves around how we explore and / or transgress our limits and, in doing so, gain a different understanding of life and death. Art, according to Bataille, is a form of transgression that explores the human condition in its most intense forms, including the relationship between violence and destruction. Hence I use him as a source.
In Bataille's philosophy, the bullet can symbolise not only the possibility of destruction, but also the energy of what it means to move into the borderland of life and death..
When the bullet is transformed into porcelain, something happens that Bataille would term as a necessary transgression. The bullet itself, once an object of threat, is transformed into an object of vulnerability. This transformation can be seen not only as an aesthetic act, but as an act of resistance to the conventional way of thinking about violence. The transformationof the bullet is thus an excessive act in itself; it changes the nature, the character of the object and makes it no longer the instrument of violence it originally was. It is this excessive transformation that also challenges the viewer to reconsider the relationship between destruction and creation. Of course delivered also to us by Friedrich Nietzsche’s juxtaposition ‘cre-
taposition ‘creating’ and ‘destruction’.
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition reveals how repetition in art can redefine perceptual and formal possibilities, examining how to employ seriality, variation, and accumulation to destabilize conventional patterns of sight and thought.
By radically reconfigure an everyday object into art, here I displace its received meanings in favor of new interpretations.
Where Deleuze allows us to see transformation as a medium for a different reality, Bataille lets us feel the transcendence of transformation of what is ‘normal’ into a new form of experience. Simultaneously Nietzsche’s Gaza abyss gazes back at us. Reflecting mercilessly our moral bankruptcy.
DISTANT SUFFERING
XXXXVII | i.d. of an encased bullet performance | multiple bullets, 113 mm x 15 mm Ø casted with white porcelain plaster in a wooden box - 17 x 5,7 x 5 cm - with brass closure red velvet edition 50 | 6 A.P.'s
All proceeds went to the Hope Foundation Zeeuwse Art Fair Pop-up the Machine Vlissingen | October 25 and 26, 2024
Photo’s courtesy of ©2024 Sylvia Hubrouck | Bo de Jong page 38
DISTANT SUFFERING LIII
| i.d. of an embedded bullet –multiple ( in production )
bullets, 113 mm x 15 mm Ø, casted with white porcelain plaster, casted in acrylic, acrylic Old Delft (Prussian) Blue, glass tube 30 cm x 3 cm Ø, metal cap, open studio day | studio complex Kipvis
Vlissingen | June 1, 2025
Edition 50 | 6 A.P.'s
All proceeds go to the Hope Foundation
Photo’s courtesy of ©2024 Sylvia Hubrouck | Bo de Jong | Giel Louws page 42
s y n o p t i c w o r d s
Despite all the preparations, starting in 2022 - finding the ‘proper’ bullet, making the 3D prints from the ‘appropriate’ one, figuring out the right size, making the molds and starting to cast the bullets from porcelain plaster - I had no idea what I was going for. No idea on what I was working toward. Other than transforming the object ‘bullet’. A bit like the concept of my ice bullet.
The first 120 bullets or so I just focused on the concentration of the making and - I hoped –on the direction. That went well until D. intuitively noticed that merely the making of these bullets was the artwork in itself. From then on, things went awry. After all, if casting the porcelain plaster bullets was the work itself, where did that artwork end?
While working on the series, things changed fundamentally in the Middle East: Hamas and affiliated groups on October 7 radically altered the resistance to Israel’s occupation of Gaza. As a result, Israel began a genocidal massacre of the Gaza population, i.e. also on my friends. Bullets, primarily designed to kill and wound, in this art work are completely transformed from destructive to harmless objects in this context. Bullets from porcelain gypsum completely undermine their destructive potential; placed in grave-like rows, a transformation occurs from an object of violence to an object of reflection and memory. By ‘verwandeln’ the destructive element of the bullet into something fragile, harmless, aesthetically pleasing, the now-appearing object reaches multiple layers of imagination.
object reaches multiple layers of imagination. Into the two directions I described on page 38/39, with the help of Deleuze and Bataille.
Conversations with filmmaker Jochem Weststrate about this project revealed an other personal layer. My art is very often composed of a multitude of variations on one form: 250+ cans with plaster keys, 136+ portraits of assassinated journalists, 3,000 images of clouds & explosions, destruction and sea-waves, 38+ “water” paintings, etc.
Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is always present in the back of my mind . . .
So in the end, the video that Jochem and I made, also became a videoportrait of this artist.
At the same time, by casting a number of these bullets every day, I hoped, compulsively and against my better judgment, that the people I know, including many people I can call my friends, in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, the West-Bank, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, etc. would stay alive.
Thus, the work and its possible purpose, apart from the making, legitimised itself within itself.
Alas: indeed against my better judgment . . .
The financial support
Vleeshal SBKM Middelburg
The exhibitions
2024 | Bewaerschole | Burgh Haamstede
2024 | Verbeke Foundation | KemzekeBelgium
2024 | Pop-up the Machine | Vlissingen
2025 | Visioni Altre | VeniceItaly
2025 | RetroQuito’25 |
The New Museum of Networked ArtGermany
2025 | Toonbeeld | Terneuzen
2026 | plan d. | DüsseldorfGermany
2026 | Film by the Sea Festival | Vlissingen
The musical inspiration
Incantation IV for three pianos | S. ten Holt
After the Last Sky | Anouar Brahem et al.
The peers
Oleg KharchenkoUkraine | Maisara BaroudGaza | Giel Louws | Dani Ploeger
Jochem Weststrate | Willy van Houtum
The craftsmen
Loek Overvliet - rage of the bullet | Hans Bommeljé - 3D-prints / moulds
Jaap | JG Schilders - gilding of the bullets
Jochem Weststrate - video recording / editing
The curators
Roman Rejhold | Kate Štroblová | Sasha Rose Richter | Pamela Grombacher
Jacob Juhl | Cecilie Bernts | Rikard Fåhraeus | Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Yarina Butkowska | Jan Verhaeghe | Kit Hill | Alice Máselníková
Andreas Ribbung | Leni van den Berge | Dirk D. Knickhoff | Elisabeth Schin
Ulrike E.W. Scholder | Geeske Pluijmers | Adolfina de Stefani | Marie Verboven
leon riekwell | Arjelien van Dijke | Willy van Meegen | Jan Doense
Please see also
Statement / CV
Portfolio
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Mahmoud Darwish ( 1941 – 2008 )
Back site
still from the portrait video