Yan Duyvendak, originally from the Netherlands, lives in Geneva. Trained at the École cantonale d’art du Valais and the École supérieure d'art visuel de Genève, his career as a performance artist began in 1995 with the staging of his first work of live art, Keep It Fun For Yourself.

Since then, he has produced a chain of creations and performances from Paris to Tokyo via Madrid, Hanover or Gwangju.

His art underlines in particular how the overwhelming mass of televised, computer and mental images as well as our social codes and other rituals of our fun society thicken the curtain between ourselves and reality. Yet his work never fails to affirm human dignity and shows the extent to which it is imperiled by our image-dominated society.

His creations, Still in Paradise (2008 - ongoing), co-created with Omar Ghayatt, Please, Continue (Hamlet) (2011), co-created with Roger Bernat, Sound of Music (2015) as well as ACTIONS (2017), co-created with Nicolas Cilins and Nataly Sugnaux, are no doubt his most political pieces to date.

Yan Duyvendak’s video pieces feature in numerous public and private collections, for instance the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and the Museum der Moderne (MdM) in Salzburg. Since 2002, he has benefited from several artist-in-residence programs and won many awards, among which the most prestigious Swiss award for contemporary art, the “Meret Oppenheim Preis”.

Since 2012, Cie Yan Duyvendak has received financial support from the City and Canton of Geneva as well as from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.