Marijke van Warmerdam and the Endless Film Loop

A girl with brown curls, in a white dress and bare feet, comes into the frame and does a handstand against a brick wall. Then she does it again, and again, for as long as the projector runs. The film is Handstand, made by Marijke van Warmerdam in 1992. It lasts one minute and forty seconds on 16mm colour stock, and it never ends, because its end is joined to its beginning.

The artist’s account of the idea is disarmingly simple. “Since childhood I have done countless handstands in my room and making a film of a girl doing a handstand was very obvious, once I’d decided to make something with movement.” That sentence holds most of what makes her work distinctive: an everyday action, a decision to work with motion, and a refusal to dress the result up as narrative.

The loop as a sculptural form

Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, which has worked closely with her catalogue, summarises the principle: the beginning and end of each film are spliced together, so that it repeats without end, often with a hypnotic result. Eye places her among the artists who have worked with the film loop since the 1990s, and lists among her images a girl doing a handstand, hats carried off by the wind and dancing balls of water.

The record for Handstand in the De Vleeshal Collection in Middelburg, which owns a version of the work under inventory number VH0279, notes that Van Warmerdam began by making sculpture in a range of materials before moving into film and video. That history shows. Her films are installed as objects in a room. Handstand is shown with a projector, a loop system and a projection table, and the artist’s site gives an installed image of roughly 190 by 253 centimetres. The Vleeshal record emphasises that the camera stays fixed, that the projectors remain visible, and that viewers can step into the beam and interact physically with the image.

That visibility is part of the point. The machinery is not hidden in a booth. A visitor sees the loop of film running through the apparatus and the girl going up and down on the wall at the same time, and understands that the repetition is mechanical as well as visual. The work is about process and action, the Vleeshal record says, not about telling a story.

From Prix de Rome to Venice

Handstand was one of five films Van Warmerdam submitted for the Prix de Rome in 1992, together with Passage, Pashok, Kring and Fare thee well. It was shown that year in Amsterdam in the Prix de Rome exhibition for sculpture and art in public space, then in Watt in Rotterdam in 1994.

In 1995 she showed at the 46th Venice Biennale, and she made a new film for the occasion. Douche (Shower) is a 16mm colour loop of a man under a running shower, five minutes and fifty-one seconds long. The artist’s own note on the work explains the logic: in the humid Venetian summer, a cooling shower seemed the right image to offer. When the curator Rudi Fuchs asked her on the radio why she had chosen this particular man, she replied: “This is someone who is very good at showering.”

The answer is funny and exact. Van Warmerdam’s subjects are not symbols. They are people and things doing one action well, and the loop lets that competence turn into something closer to a rhythm or a pattern. Wikipedia credits the 1995 Biennale as the point at which her film loops first drew international attention.

A shower on a station platform

Douche had an unusual second life. Shortly after the Biennale, she was asked to make a work for NS Schiphol, the railway station at Amsterdam’s airport. The film became a permanent installation there, which Wikipedia places on one of the station platforms. She described it as a refreshing image for travellers who badly needed one.

The practical side was demanding. She reshot the film for the station, and the cinema projector was housed in a container kept so free of dust that the print could run for eight to ten months before the copy had to be changed. A loop that in a gallery runs for the length of an exhibition was here running for most of a year in front of travellers waiting for trains.

That setting is a good test of what her films do. Few people on a platform would watch a film from beginning to end. People glance up, look away, and look back. A loop with no plot suits that kind of attention perfectly, because there is nothing to miss.

Wind and the move to digital

The loops changed medium over time. Eye notes that Van Warmerdam moved from analogue to digital film in 2011, and that the museum has restored and digitised her catalogue. Her own list of works since then is long. It includes Monologue intérieur (2013), Solution (2014), Prague 24/7 (2015), Fast Forward (2016), Overlap (2017), La visione (2018), Drip trip (2020), a dense run of loops in 2021 including Those days, these days, Per sempre and The runner, and more recent works such as Roll over (2022) and It’s time (2023).

Just before the switch came Wind, from 2010, a 35mm loop now shown in a digital version. Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, which holds the work in its collection, describes leaves, litter and a single feather being swept across an empty industrial site by gusts, with the camera following the wind’s path. Magasin III showed it at its Jaffa space from November 20 to December 19, 2020, in an exhibition curated by Karmit Galili. Van Warmerdam has called it her most narrative film so far, because of that lone feather. In a body of work built on avoiding story, even one feather counts as plot.

The loop returns to the room

Handstand keeps returning to view. Her own site lists it in Temporary Stedelijk 2 in Amsterdam and Dichtbij in de verte in Rotterdam, both in 2011, and in De perto à distância in Porto in 2012. The Vleeshal record lists The Collection XIX: A Story of the Image in 2007 and Vleeshal Collectie On Tour, from July 4 to September 13, 2026.

In 2025 Eye staged an event called 30 x 3’, in which thirty invited guests each spoke about one of her film loops, assembling a live catalogue of her work as part of the museum’s Eye on Art programme. It was a fitting format for an artist whose films are short, numerous and self contained. Each one is a single action, and each one is, in principle, endless.