Mariëlle Videler, born in Bergen op Zoom (NL), lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied at the Academy for Visual Arts, Tilburg, and for her MA at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Based on artistic research, often self-initiated, she works on long-term projects and creates large, detailed installations. Her practice embraces different media such as, drawings, textile, performances, photography and video – aiming to shape life through the prism of imagination. 

Love for life in all its forms and creating gateways to existence without distinction between human and non-human form the core of her artistic path. Since 2019 she has been working on the long-term project Reconstructing the Senses; 365 BIRDS, 365 PLANTS, 365 INSECTS. This intense project has developed from projects for which she made three exceptional and blindfolded journeys: Blinded Tourist (2010), Blinded Resident (2014) and Blinded Hunt (2017). 

During intensive residency’s in Brazilë, Colombia, Curaçao, Greenland and Morocco she carefully immersed herself in the knowledge, ideology, craft and local contemporary life of people such as the Ahuacos in La Sierra Nevada, Colombia and the Inuit in Greenland. Her work is a sensory quest for consciousness and physicality. Mariëlle Videler identifies with a traveller, who makes – above all – imaginary journeys. She explores visual languages, drawings, patterns, materials and rituals used to imagine connections with other life forms such as plants, animals and rivers.

The work of Mariëlle Videler has been exhibited internationally at artist initiatives, galleries and museums, such as Museum Arnhem (Arnhem, The Netherlands), 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). Videler was the founder and artistic director of Performance Lab from 2004 to 2012, an Amsterdam based research lab for performance art. Her work is included in various art collections, such as the Dutch National Art Collection (Rijkscollectie), the Instituto Buena Bista collection (Centre for Contemporary Art Curaçao), Municipal Collection Nijmegen, and private collections at home and abroad.

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. (NRC, 10 november 2021.)