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POST is honored to present the first presentation of Puck Verkade’s work Plague in the Netherlands. Verkade’s artistic practice centers around moving images, installation and drawing. Delivered with humour and a distinct taste for the absurd, her videos and drawings tell stories from uncanny perspectives in which archetypal personas are reimagined to candidly expose the contradictions of human behaviour. Puck Verkade exhibited earlier at POST in the exhibition On the Line of the Equator in 2019.

Plague is a multimedia installation with at the core a one-channel video, that is surrounded by sculptures and paintings. The video is narrated by a frustrated housefly that fantasizes about human extermination. Trapped in a fever dream of domesticity, absurdist parallels between ecological and psychological breakdown unfold when Housefly meets Housewife. 

A key interest of Verkade when working on Plague was the concept of Solastalgia. It is a sociological term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by climate change and the changes it causes to our shared habitat. In Plague various scales of Solastalgia unfold; comparing the Earth, the domestic home and the personal psyche as interconnected habitats of suffering. By damaging the Earth we are damaging ourselves, and so along with the current urgent ecological breakdown, there is also a looming collective psychological breakdown. Usually the housefly is regarded as a domestic pest, an invasive species that plagues our homes. However, compared to the melodramatic housewife, here the housefly is very articulate. Verkade wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the housefly, as a messenger between the indoor and outdoor worlds, breaking up the confines of the housewife’s psyche.

Plague was co-commissioned by DordtYart / Mondriaan Fund and acquired by the Zabludowicz Collection and furthermore held by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Servais Family Collection, EKARD collection, Blue Knowledge Art Collection. Puck Verkade is represented by gallery Dürst Britt & Mayhew from The Hague.