September 2015 I met Sarah Shat, pupil to my (international) classroom, who fled with her family from Palestine, but leaving her father behind. Her parents were peace activists and suspicious to both Israel ánd Hamas. As her home was shelled for a second time by Iraeli bombing the parents decided that the mother and the four children would leave Gaza. They lived in an asylum center and the two oldest children were to enroll to the school where I worked as the main teacher for the International Class. Sarah chose me to be a kind of mentor for her personally. Her story about what made the family flee from Palestine, especially the sentence with the question to her mother “Is that Uncle Mohammed lying there?”. impressed me so much, that I wanted to express it in an artwork, something that could become a kind of document for the Palestine drama.

By painting ‘Guernica‘, Pablo Picasso showed that he stood on Rubens’s shoulders. Rubens’s ‘The Consequeces of War‘ was a source of inspiration for Picasso to bring the abominations from the bombardment on April 26th 1937, on request of general Franco by German and Italian airplanes, at the Basque city of Guernica, to expression with a monumental sized painting. During the 1938 World Expo at Paris, where the painting was shown for the first time, was said that such kind of acts of terror may not take place ever again. World War 2 had not begun yet….

And after World War 2 it was said that it should be the very last war ever. In the meantime we know better….

The four more or less identical paintings that I made as a document, all together, have the same size as Picasso’s Guernica, each of them is large enough to be washing over, to be overwhelming for the viewer.

‘Guernica‘ is about the horrors of war at just one location at just one certain time. ‘Is that Uncle Mohammed lying there?‘ can show any bombardment or could be about any war at any location, everywhere and at every time, seen through the eyes of a child experiencing that violence.

But it is evident here that the four paintings, together with the title box as part of the artwork too, tell us about Palestine as the representant of ‘everywhere’. I like to show this by the text of Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwesh. But maybe especially by the girl in red, that I found in a YouTube video about an Israeli attack on Tel al Hawah, and coincidentally seems to be an echo for Steven Spielberg’s historical fiction film ‘Schindler’s List‘. At some moment this black-and-white movie shows us a little girl dressed in a red coat running around in panic as the Nazis evacuate the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Krakau in 1943. At that time the Nazis put the Jews behind barbed wire; are the Israeli’s not doing the same to the Palestinians today?

The four paintings belong together as just one work of art, but also the title cards that guide the paintings are an integral part! It is intended that these title cards will be changed every day out of ‘the stock’ in the wooden ‘title card box’. It is also intended that this stock of cards will carry future events (although rather not of course!). Reality, I guess, tells us that more attacks, acts of terror or war will follow after today, but still my hope is that one day worldwide there will be said that all this violence really has to stop. Therefore the red line on the title card box.

’I started the Palestine project mid-2016 and finished it more than a year later, hoping that I could exhibit them around May 2018, 70 years after the founding of the Israeli State, something for the Iraeli to celebrate, but for the Palestinians it is Nakba, the evacuation from the lands where they lived and worked on for so many centuries… But it took until April 2019 as the Documentation Center Palestina, DocP, the organisation that I was in contact with, found a place and opportunity for an exhibition: it was a former swimming pool building, now a theatre called ‘De Regentesse’ in The Hague, during The Palestine Film Festival. I exhibited “Is that Uncle Mohammed lying there?” together with artworks by Senad Alic and Mieke Krediet. The exhibition was called ‘Dutch Visions of Palestine’ and was curated by Anissa Foukalne.