Guido van der Werve

Guido van der Werve is a Dutch filmmaker and artist whose work has been exhibited and screened widely, finding recognition in both the art and film world. He is best known for documented performances in which he pushes his body to its physical limits, accompanied by classical musical arrangements – often composed by himself. Among the feats of incredible endurance and peril the artist has performed—standing on the North Pole for 24 hours, completing a 1500 kilometer triathlon, setting himself on fire, being hit by a speeding car—he finds moments of serenity and even banality in each rendition. Van der Werve started out as a performance artist but unwilling to perform live and more than once, he began to document his performances. Developing this practice, he became interested in film and cinematography, where he found a similar emotional directness as in music. The foundation of Van der Werve’s work is performance, but he has incorporated music, text, and athletics as recurring elements. Thus far, Van der Werve has created seventeen elaborate video works, all of which are numbered in Dutch and subtitled in English. In 2023, Van der Werve presented his first feature film titled Nummer achttien - the breath of life. After a near-fatal accident, the artist muses about the highs and lows of his own life as he endures a long process of recovery. The movie is structured as a series of movements: it departs from the classical documentary to present us with a series of vignettes that combine past and present, existentialist despair and deadpan humour, existentialist despair and deadpan humour, reflection and creativity, the joys and pains of remembering and forgetting.