Xavier Verhoest
Artist's Statement
Our Memories Can’t Wait (for Palestine)
‘Peace is an elegy said over a young man whose heart’s been torn open by neither bullet nor bomb,
but the beauty-spot of his beloved.’
Mahmoud Darwich, Ramallah, 2002
Xavier Verhoest is a visual artist who has lived and worked in Nairobi since 2001. For the last 20 years, he has been exhibiting in Kenya, France and Belgium.
He is the co-founder of Art2be, a group of artists, psychologists, activists and researchers who aim to bring positive living and social cohesion to various settings and for various groups, using artistic methodologies such as Body Mapping, Hero Book, Photo Voice and Mapping your Place.
Born in DR Congo in 1964, Xavier Verhoest studied film editing in Belgium.
In 1992, he joined Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) as a volunteer and worked until 2003 in Palestine, Kenya, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Azerbaijan and Syria.
I started painting in Jerusalem. I remember the need, the impulse to vanish into the canvases every Saturday and embrace my reality, looking for a sense of beauty, inner peace, hope. I needed that suspended time to enlarge such a contrived world defined by closeness, road blockages, violence, make the unapproachable approachable, by using artistic means; to leave the non-human representation and instead, using skies, seas, trees, flowers, to define limitations, borders, belonging, beauty, roots, destruction, it all started there in Jerusalem.
Until today, after Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and many other man-made disasters in places where I have and still work, Art has become that place where all is about being still, the studio is the safe space. A place of remembrance, my memory tool, a means to ‘quiet’ the outer world, so that my inner world might bring insight, escaping from what affects me in the outer reality.
I have never really walked away from Palestine and their experiences. It has shaped me from the moment it happened. I am still listening and seeing the echoes of them. With this, my pursuit of the most elusive and ineffable quest: how to give account of these unforgettable experiences as an artist? Who am I to do this, how to get involved, how to activate a process for others and for me? I was about to travel to Palestine in the near future to work with groups of youth and ex-prisoners to reflect artistically on their experiences of this world… time will tell.
Today, we are at 140 days after the beginning of the war in Gaza.
Almost 40,000 killed (half of them are women and children), 2,000,000 displaced (80% of the population ), 300,000 habitations partially or fully destroyed, 127 journalists killed, 400 health care professionals killed, artists killed, activists killed, 200 heritage sites damaged or destroyed, mosques, churches as well, no infrastructures left in place…Whatever happened on the 7th of October with the killing of 1,100 Israeli civilians was monstrous but this war by Israel is to make the entire Gaza strip uninhabitable, and this is not the by-product of this military campaign. It is its objective and it is not justifiable.
From the outside, the minimum any human being can say is that these figures can only leave us uneasy, disturbed, distressed, sickened and enraged. From inside, it is hell, and hell has different forms in Palestine.
I have spent 2 years in the Territories (Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza) in 1999 and 2000 working for Doctors without Borders. In the West Bank, anybody, except the Jewish settlers who are today 500, 000, can be controlled, can be imprisoned and are in one way or another, subject to psychological or physical harassment.
For me, it was twenty years ago, but in my heart it is still today and tomorrow as the Israeli occupation got worse in the West Bank and now in Gaza, it has taken on a new dimension never seen before.
Except for the ICJ ruling thanks to South Africa, asking Israel to prevent act of Genocide and allow humanitarian assistance, there is still today nothing from the Western democracies. On the contrary, arming Israel combined with promises for future humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians are their mantras. Without any shame and they are openly hypocritical. We still carry the heavy weight of the Shoah but until what point?
I feel deep inside, the moral failure of my world, the moral authority that once preempted has vanished in the face of the impunity of elected governments. One state is systematically violating human rights and international laws for the past decades. Israel shows us today how a society can take extremist viewpoints that were once considered fringe and begin to launder them into some sort of acceptability.
With Gaza, we are moving in a horrifying direction where ethnic cleansing, incitement to commit genocide, killing and mass destruction are the norms for a country that defines itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.
I wish these artworks can become a journey for you as much as they represent mine.
I create open images between oblivion and remembrance. I do not really know how they come back, why they haunt me at times. In art, there are so many moments in between doubts and certitudes, completeness and incompleteness, placing one foot after the other, learning to stand, make senses of the disappearances, of the ghosts, of the lost hearts, as they had all gone and I stayed. I live in them and for them. That is the little I can do today.
* A percentage of the sales will go to a Palestinian NGO assisting childrens' mental health care in Gaza.
Xavier Verhoest, Nairobi, February 2024
