Artwork Data
Artwork Location
Address
Duinstraat, Den Haag
City district
Scheveningen
GPS data
52.102228628459, 4.2783188587525 View on map
Artwork Description
Text
Silence descends upon you as soon as you pass through the monumental classical gate located at the intersection of Duinstraat and Prins Willemstraat in Scheveningen. At the end of an uphill path, you come across another monumental gate. This gives access to the oldest private outdoor cemetery in the Netherlands: Ter Navolging (1780).
The second gate is clearly much more modern than the cemetery itself. It was created in the early 1990s by visual artist Leontine Lieffering for the Bight of Guinea. Stroom The Hague organized this project between 1992 and 1994. At the time, ten artists from The Hague were invited to submit a proposal for a work of art in the city's public space. The goal was to create a collection of meaningful places to which individual and collective events, histories and feelings are linked.Lieffering eventually chose this particular cemetery.
The light gray steel tubes of the fencing of her gate show highly simplified perspective drawings of architecture. In addition to arches, columns and walls can be discovered. In the large circle in the center of the gate, Lieffering has installed glass on which she has printed in black photographs of architectural fragments from The Hague. Those fragments are as often of historic buildings as of infrastructure (an electricity house).
Many of Liefferings monumental, often temporary installations resemble drawings in space. In carefully selected locations, she makes an intervention with simple means. Her work usually responds to locations, buildings and structures, uncovering old memories and stories of that place almost imperceptibly. Not for nothing does this gateway bear the title Loci e Imagine (places and images). With this gateway, she has depicted the effect of history almost tangibly. After all, a cemetery is pre-eminently a place of history.