Men Loving: New Killings

Men are being thrown off rooftops in Syria and Iraq. Accused of being gay by members of ISIS, they are blindfolded and bound and then pitched to the streets below where crowds of men and boys wait with piles of stones.

The killers photograph these murders from the tops of buildings or from the pavement. The photographs are then published by ISIS and form part of a visualized ideology skillfully disseminated through their own publications and released on other news platforms. Clive van den Berg has been working from these images. They are appalling, difficult to look at, as much for the immediacy of the individual tragedies as for the fact that these men cannot be mourned. Unnamed and unnameable, they are denied any connection with familial and social fabrics, leaving the photographs taken by the killers as the dominant public record of their deaths. Clive van den Berg discusses his recent sculptural commemorations of these events.