Dries Verhoeven is a Dutch visual artist and theatre maker whose projects sit between performance, installation and public intervention. He studied theatre scenography and began making independent work in 2003. Rather than separating stage and audience, he constructs situations in which visitors become implicated in the work. His installations unfold in museums, theatres and urban spaces, often over extended durations and with live performers. By manipulating architecture, proximity, surveillance and participation, he examines how spectators look at other people and how public behaviour is shaped by social norms. Recurring subjects include vulnerability, migration, labour, digital intimacy, chemical desire and unequal relations between the Global North and South.
In 2026, Verhoeven represents the Netherlands at the 61st Venice Biennale with The Fortress, created with curator Rieke Vos. The project transforms Gerrit Rietveld’s normally open Dutch Pavilion into a sealed, darkened structure. Metal shutters descend over the windows while thirteen international performers emerge among the audience and produce raw vocal sounds. The work links bodily disorientation to wider geopolitical uncertainty and questions the persistence of national pavilions as symbols of an older world order. Presented from 9 May to 22 November, it is the first Dutch Biennale entry centred on performance and the first to make the pavilion itself an integral part of the artwork.