POST is honored to be the first to present Puck Verkade's work Plague in the Netherlands. Moving images, installations and drawings are central to Verkade's artistic practice. With humor and a pronounced penchant for the absurd, she tells stories through her videos and drawings from uncanny perspectives in which archetypal characters are used to candidly expose the contradictions in human behavior. Puck Verkade previously exhibited at POST in the exhibition On the Line of the Equator in 2019.
Plague is a multimedia installation with a single-channel video at its core, surrounded by sculptures and paintings. The video is told from the perspective of a frustrated housefly who fantasizes about the extermination of humanity. Caught in a fever dream of domesticity, all kinds of absurdist parallels between ecological and psychological ruin/breakdown unfold when Housefly meets Housewife.
An important source of inspiration for Verkade when working on Plague was the concept of 'solastalgia'; a sociological term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It describes a form of mental or existential turmoil caused by climate crisis and the changes it brings to our shared habitat. In Plague, solastalgia unfolds on several levels, comparing the earth, the home, and the personal psyche as interconnected habitats where suffering is central. By damaging the Earth, we damage ourselves, and so in addition to the current dramatic ecological demise, there is also a looming collective psychological breakdown. Usually the housefly is considered pests, as an invasive species that infests our homes, but compared to the melodramatic housewife, however, the housefly is very pronounced here. Verkade wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the housefly, as a messenger between the inner and outer world, who breaks through the boundaries of the housewife's psyche.
Plague will be on display at POST Arnhem between 27 January - 28 April 2024.
