Nummer acht: Everything is going to be alright

Dutch artist and film-maker Guido van der Werve’s works are vignettes of the loneliness and absurdity of existence. A trained classical pianist and composer, he is famously obsessed with Frederic Chopin, whose life and compositions form an important part of his many filmed performances alongside references to other exiled romantic figures such as the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Many of Van der Werve’s dark and idiosyncratic films border on slapstick. For Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world (2007), Van der Werve stood for 24 hours at the North Pole, letting the Earth rotate under him as he stubbornly turned in the opposite direction.

Van der Werve’s exhibit at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014 was shot near Finland in the Gulf of Bothnia, a frontier zone that lies covered in ice five months in a year. Titled Nummer acht: Everything is going to be alright (2007), the 10-minute film shows the artist walking towards the viewer on ice sheets covering the water as a massive ice-breaking ship —the Sampo— follows his trail. A lone figure clad in black, Van der Werve walks barely 10 metres ahead of the ship as it tears through the white expanse, an alive and menacing presence– a killer whale stalking its prey. The roar of the icebreaker’s engine and the sound of steel blades pulverising the ice create an atmosphere of intense threat and terror as the ship closes in on the dwarfed, weary body of the artist.