Yan Duyvendak

Originally from the Netherlands, I live in Geneva. Trained at the École cantonale d’art du Valais and the École supérieure d'art visuel de Genève.

Since 1995, I have produced a chain of creations and performances at major European venues and beyond. My latest creations, dealing with the notion of citizenship and inviting people to (re)act, are no doubt my most political pieces to date:
- “Still In Paradise” (2008-2018), co-created with the Egyptian artist Omar Ghayatt, questions the relationship in between the Muslim and Occidental worlds
- “Please, Continue (Hamlet)” (2011), co-created with Roger Bernat, staging the human functioning of local justice systems
- “Sound of Music” (2015), a glittery musical focusing on world crisis (overpopulation, ecological disasters, wars, etc) 
- “ACTIONS” (2016) co-created with Nicolas Cilins and Nataly Sugnaux, giving insights on the local reception of refugees and bringing local institutions, associations, theatre venues, refugees and citizens to commit together
Commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross, we now work on the adaptation of the project to the issues faced by the ICRC staff on the fields.

The notion of empathy is omnipresent in my work and, in the coming years, I’m planning to work both on civil disobedience and actions to manage a global epidemic.

Besides my activities as an artist, from 2004 to 2014 I worked as the coordinator of the “art/action” programme at the Haute Ecole d’Art et Design (HEAD) in Geneva, where, together with Christophe Kihm, La Ribot and Lina Saneh (among others), we worked in a bottom-up pedagogical system for creating strong coherences between meaning and form. As from 2019, I will be teaching on the notions of “operations” and “devices” at the Manufacture, Haute Ecole des Arts de la Scène, Lausanne.