Guido van der Werve

Guido van der Werve
Nummer Acht, Everything is Going To Be Alright
(2007)

Gulf of Bothnia, in Finland: a man is advancing on the crashing ice, ahead of an ice-breaker. A small being, who can be engulfed anytime by the endless plateau of ice, who can be crashed anytime by the giant roaring behind; l'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant ... Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble ... parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt ... l'univers n'en sait rien.


Guido van der Werve, born in 1977, lives in Amsterdam. A large span of interests: music, chess, visual arts, industrial design, archeology and Russian. Impressive, isn't it? In the visual arts he started with painting, then he passed to performance art, and then to film. Actually his movies (ten shorts up to date) represent also a form of performance art (like in the case of Kimsooja): the artist is often at the center of his elaborate and sly dramas, playing piano on a float in the middle of a lake, launching an asteroid back to where it came from, greeting a flock of ballerinas in the middle of the street, positing a grand piano through his apartment window, and turning slowly in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation, while standing on the North Pole (Hirshhorn).





(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(German and Nordic Cinema)