Human van der Merwe
Human van der Merwe is a South African performance artist and artistic researcher based in Vienna. Holding a Master’s degree in Performance Practice, he works across performance, movement, visual art, scenography, and digital media, creating hybrid works that investigate the body as a living archive of memory and place. His practice centres on collecting fragments encountered across different geographies, which he layers and recomposes into experimental performances and texts. Through this interdisciplinary approach, he explores how identity is continuously reconstructed through accumulated experience.
“Now living between languages and geographies, I have come to understand the body as a carrier of layered transitions.”
I am an artist and artistic researcher working across experimental performance practices that extend into movement, visual art, digital art, scenography, and text. My work explores liminal ways of knowing through embodied processes, particularly in relation to belonging, culture, and the ongoing construction of identity.
My practice is shaped by lived experience. My position as a white Afrikaner from post-apartheid South Africa informs my practice through questions of inherited privilege, belonging, historical memory, and the unresolved tensions of place. Now living between languages and geographies, I have come to understand the body as a carrier of layered transitions. This sense of accumulation, where fragments of different phases persist and coexist, has become a central force in my practice.
My process is experimental and often begins with a hunch, a pull towards something unresolved that I cannot yet fully articulate. From there, I work through collecting and sensing, a form of foraging. I gather images, objects, texts, gestures, sounds, and spatial impressions, allowing them to form an evolving archive. Meaning is not immediately visible, but emerges through placing the body in relation to these materials, allowing a #thinking-through# of objects, spaces, and traces.
When I speak of performance, I do not refer only to a staged or theatrical event, but to a way of working. It is one condition among others, alongside movement, material, image, and text, through which the work unfolds. I approach this through a notion of decentred dramaturgy, where encounters between bodies, materials, and spaces are organised without a fixed hierarchy. Form is not decided in advance; but discovered through process.
The work may take multiple forms, including live performance, video, installation, text, or self-published works such as zines. Each work produces residues, traces that remain and can reactivate the process in different ways. I understand my practice as an ongoing investigation rather than a series of separate works. I return to a question that continues to shift: what remains, and how can it be encountered again? Through this, I investigate how identity and knowledge are constructed, disrupted, and reconfigured through embodied experience.
