After seeing ISIS propaganda footage of gay men thrown from rooftops in Syria and Iraq and then publicly stoned, Clive van den Berg needed to “make good” these violated lives.

In A Pile of Stones, van den Berg exercises this reparative impulse, composing a body of work that protests against the actions of ISIS by “inverting the gaze” from voyeuristic propaganda, whose intention is to paralyse the viewer, to an empathetic and responsible act of looking.

His vision: to commemorate the lives of nameless men who are “wiped” from the ISIS regime for exhibiting the “wrong” kind of masculinity and to attribute dignity to these “ungrieveable” victims whose relations, friends and lovers cannot mourn them without implicating themselves.

Van den Berg’s solo exhibition straddles two central desires: to “carve out” a language of grieving in an increasingly intolerant global context where nonconformist masculinities are under threat, and to represent the horror of the ISIS killings – to re-construe the mechanics of the gaze – without re-inscribing the violation.

In his sculpture and painting, the artist pulls us closer to these surreal, barbaric scenes: from masked human bodies frozen in mid-air to crowd members grabbing stones to throw. At the same time, van den Berg highlights rare moments of reluctance in the crowd, interpreting them as possible silent protests.

Van den Berg reads the complicity with ISIS brutalist masculinity as a cloak of personal protection not to be judged, but to be understood within a repressive context. In these carefully “re-enacted” pieces, he asks: “In a society of coercive masculinity, is picking up the first stone an act of protection for some people?”