Human van der Merwe
Human van der Merwe is a South African interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher based in Vienna. Holding a Master’s degree in Performance Practice, he works across performance, installation, digital media, text, and spatial practice, creating hybrid works that investigate the body as a site where traces, memories, and encounters accumulate across places and time. His practice centres on collecting fragments encountered across different geographies, layering and recomposing them into experimental forms. Through interdisciplinary artistic research, he investigates what remains through embodied experience.
“Now living between languages and geographies, I have come to understand the body as a carrier of layered transitions.”
I am an interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher working across experimental performance practices that unfold through installation, visual art, digital media, spatial practice, and text. My work explores questions surrounding traces, residues, and what remains after encounters. Through interdisciplinary processes, I investigate how experiences accumulate within the body and continue to shape belonging, identity, memory, and multiple ways of knowing.
As a white Afrikaner from post-apartheid South Africa, questions of inherited privilege, belonging, historical memory, and place have long informed my thinking. Rather than leaving these questions behind, migration has made them newly tangible, revealing how histories of place and belonging continue to travel with the body. Now living between languages and geographies, I have come to understand the body as a carrier of layered transitions.
My process is experimental and often begins with a hunch, a pull towards something unresolved that I cannot yet articulate. From there, I work through collecting and sensing as a form of foraging, gathering objects, gestures, images, texts, sounds, and spatial impressions as residues of encounters. A horizontal dramaturgy gradually unfolds as the body is placed in relation to materials, objects, texts, sounds, and spaces, allowing new forms and meanings to emerge through their constellations.
Coming from a theatre background, my practice has gradually shifted towards embracing instability, not only within the themes I explore but also within the making itself. I work with porous boundaries between disciplines, allowing their intersections to shape both process and form. Performance may become writing, writing may become installation, and installation may generate movement, sound, or research. Form is therefore not predetermined but discovered through process.
My work takes multiple forms, including live performance, installation, video, text, and self-published works. Each project leaves behind residues that can be reactivated in new contexts, contributing to an ever-evolving archive of materials and encounters. I think of my practice as one of accumulation and unearthing, where nothing disappears completely but continues to echo through bodies, spaces, and the futures we inhabit.
