Mariëlle Videler, born in Bergen op Zoom (NL) in 1970, currently lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied at the Academy for Visual Arts, Tilburg, and for her MA at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Her practice embraces different media such as installations, drawings, textile, performances, photography and video – aiming to shape life through the prism of imagination.

Love for life in all its forms is the core of her artistic investigation. Since 2019, she has been working on the long-running project Reconstructing the Senses; 365 BIRDS, 365 PLANTS, 365 INSECTS. This intense project has developed over the past ten years, from projects for which she made five exceptional journeys, three of which were blindfolded. She spent intensive work periods in South America, Morocco and Greenland to carefully, often without direct contact, delve into the knowledge, cosmology, craft and contemorary life of a number of indigenous cultures such as the Colombian Kogi and the Inuit in Greenland. She tries to mirror herself in this context and identify with the crises faced by the indigenous peoples. And above all to question the way our lives are intertwined. Her work is a sensory search for awareness and physicality. Identifying herself with a traveler who makes physical, but above all imaginary journeys.

Videler's work is deliberately labor intensive and by working project-based she creates a vacuum of time in which things can arise. Craftsmanship is a means of slowing down, investing the self, inspiring the work. 'For me it's about concentration and rhythm, patterns and structure. I want to penetrate beneath the surface and touch deeper layers of consciousness.'

Art critic Lucette Terborg wrote in NRC newspaper (2021) about Videler's work: 'Because that is what Videler's work is imbued with: the idea that everything is endowed with a transformative power and that it is about bringing that power to life.’


Her work has been exhibited internationally at artist initiatives, galleries and museums, such as Museum for Contemporary Art, MSUB / MoCAB (Belgrade, Serbia), Casco Art Institute (Utrecht, The Netherlands), 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) and de Oude Kerk (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). 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. Her work is included in collections such as the Dutch National Collection, Instituto Buena Bista - Centre for Contemporary Art Curaçao, Municipality Nijmegen, and private collections at home and abroad.