Guido van der Werve, ‘Nummer Negen: The Day I Didn’t Turn With the World,’ (2007). (Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine)

Guido van der Werve stops the world in New York

The High Line's Channel 14 venue hosts Dutch video artist's anti-earth-turning work

Whether you live there or not, if you're into the creative arts you might be forgiven for thinking the world revolves around New York. From the beginning of next month residents of the city may be able to see just what that truly looks like. Or perhaps more accurately, what it looks like when one artist spends a day not turning along with the motion of the planet.

From November 1 The High Line park's Channel 14 exhibition space will screen Guido van der Werve's 2007 film,  The Day I Didn’t Turn With the World. This nine-minute, timelapsed film shows  van der Werve standing on the Geographic Northpole, from the 28th to the 29th of April 2007, turning in the opposite direction to the earth's own rotation, while music composed by himself plays in the background. This is the ninth in the artist's numbered film series, and is typically balanced in its humour, whimsy  and thoughtfulness. The previous film in the series, Nummer acht Everything Is Going To Be All Right, shows the artist successfully outrunning an icerbreaker ship on the gulf of Bothnia, Finland.

“Guido’s video is a contemporary update on the tradition of romantic landscape paintings,” says High Line Art director Cecilia Alemani. “Just like in a beautiful 19th-century painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the individual is immersed in a sublime landscape, desperately trying to find his place in the universe.”

It will certainly come as a pleasant break from the pellmell of shopping season in Manhattan. And if you like what you see, make for Bushwick; this screening coincides with van der Werve's retrospective at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Brooklyn.