Mariëlle Videler
Visual artist Mariëlle Videler (NL, 1970) works across media, creating installations, drawings, objects, videos and performances. Based on the belief that all organisms have equal value, she creates a pathway through the textures of the world. She explores a new, intensive way of feeling, perceiving and acting. Identifying herself with a traveller who makes physical, but above all imaginary journeys. For the past ten years she has been done intensive research into the knowledge, ideology and craft of indigenous cultures such as the Colombian Kogi and the Inuit of Greenland. Her work is a sensory search for consciousness and physicality. The work and life of Mariëlle Videler is devoted to detachment and re-attachment, an obsessive and confrontational quest. She questions the impact of worldwide extractivism, of tourism, and of the wall of global capitalism. And she endeavours to strike a balance between worldwide social reflections on the one hand and her own local and cultural history on the other. Even though she knows that existing systems are practically unbeatable; she wants to develop an alternative with her work. Art historian Tineke Reijnders comforts her with the words: ‘Art cannot change politics. What it can do is to melt frozen ways of thinking and mix them into a new cocktail.’ Mariëlle Videler studied at the Academy for Visual Arts, Tilburg, and the Fine Arts Department of the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited at artist initiatives, galleries, museums and festivals around the world, such as Today Art Museum (Beijing, China), International Sinopale 2 (Sinop, Turkey), MASP and Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo, Brazil), FLORA ars+natura, (Bogotá, Columbia), Institut Néerlandais (Paris, France). Mariëlle Videler is represented by Lumen Travo Gallery in Amsterdam and supported by the Dutch Mondrian Fund. She was the founder and artistic director of the Amsterdam based initiative Performance Lab from 2004 to 2012, a collective research lab for performance art.
Photographer: Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen
