Cursed is Dutch artist Puck Verkade’s first comprehensive museum show, as well as her first presentation of her work in Poland. The exhibition features five video installations created since 2017 as well as premiering a new piece commissioned for the show. In her practice, Verkade revises archetypal narratives that shape the social structures of human experience. The themes of her works – from the questions of accountability and complicity to the most recent investigation of demands and freedom of choice – offer an insightful look at the narratives and issues that shape everyday cognition. Playful, subversive and toying with the absurd, the video installations are often narrated from a non-human perspective that questions the contradictions inherent in our behaviours and the systems we have created for ourselves.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Verkade’s 2020 video in which an inner demon navigates a journey through the trapdoors of the haunted mind, intertwining experiences of anxiety and despair with subliminal archetypes. In the context of the exhibition, the title comes to represent the complex relations between the inner and outer worlds, the alchemical principles and science, categories of knowledge and heresy, structures of power and dependency – which are some of the main threads weaving through both the presentation and the artist’s entire practice. Bringing them together is a question of agency, of inevitability of a cursed fate and of the structures of powers that govern them.