The Swiss American artist and composer Christian Marclay produces groundbreaking work in which he makes use of 'found' fragments of film and sound to explore our modern culture. Marclay was born in California and grew up in the Swiss city of Geneva. His mother was an American, his father Swiss. Between 1975 and 1977 he studied at the École Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva and from 1977 to 1980 at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In 1978 he was also a guest student at Cooper Union in New York. Marclay was a turntablist avant la lettre; the first DJ who in the late seventies, simultaneously with but independent of the hip hop movement, started experimenting with the manual manipulation of turntables, as in scratching. Marclay used the record player to manipulate, deconstruct and reconstruct music. His LP Encores (1988) was built up from physically cut and pasted vinyl material of various records. This process of putting found objects into a new context is still guiding his work today. As well as with his albums, Marclay also created collages from fragments of album covers, producing new and sometimes surreal compositions (Body Mix, 1991-92), including a series of Deutsche Grammaphon conductors with the legs of Tina Turner.

Since the beginning of the milennium Marclay is making audiovisual work which further explores the relations between (moving) image and sound. In The Bell and the Glass (2003) he juxtaposes in image and sound two icons of the city of Philadelphia: the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp's famous art work The Large Glass. On top of that, the film also serves as an audiovisual score for a small ensemble to improvise on the images and sounds. Other such video scores which Marclay has produced in the last ten years are Screen Play, Shuffle and his latest work Everyday. All three of these works are performed at the Holland Festival 2013.

Marclay's most famous work is The Clock (2010), for which he created a 24 hour audiovisual composition from existing film footage which in some way depicts a particular time of day, so that the art work itself can be perceived or used as an audiovisual 24 hour clock. The Clock was first exhibited at London's White Cube Gallery and has since toured the world. In 2011, it was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.