Dries Verhoeven

Biography

Dries Verhoeven, born in Oosterhout, Netherlands in 1976, is an artist working in theatre and the visual arts. He lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. With his works, located at the interface of theatre and installation, he creates an unsettling realm of tension between spectators and performers, everyday reality and art. They encourage us to take different perspectives on the world and society; the spectators take on an active role and the theatre is perceived as a “total experience”.
 

In “You Are Here” (2007), a large-scale hotel installation, the visitor is confronted with a mirrored ceiling of more than 400 m2, by means of which the spectator can watch the simultaneous lives of the other visitors. In the baroque funeral mass “The Funeral” (2014) spectators are asks to bury parts of the neoliberal world. Dries Verhoeven's latest works can be positioned in the visual arts. In “Ceci n'est pas...” (2013) extraordinary personalities are exhibited in a glass box in public places with the goal of effecting an open confrontation with taboo topics that are normally either treated in a populist manner in public or are not addressed at all. In “Homo Desperatus” (2014) Verhoeven's first work in a museum, 70,000 ants populated an architectural model of current human catastrophes.
 

Dries Verhoeven's works have been shown at various European festivals like the Wiener Festwochen and the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT).  In 2009 Dries Verhoeven received the “Young Directors Award” at the Salzburger Festspiele for his installation “You are Here”. He has worked for the Schauspielhaus Bochum, Battersea Arts Centre London and the Münchner Kammerspiele. HAU Hebbel am Ufer has already shown several of his productions, including the Mime Prize winning projects “You are Here” and “No Man's Land”. In 2012 he was a guest artist at the “Weltausstellung” with “Fare Thee Well”, an installation that gave spectators at the Tempelhofer Feld the opportunity to bid farewell from their everyday, ordinary lives. The production “Wanna Play? – Love in the Age of Grindr” was created in co-operation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer as part of the series “Treffpunkte”.