Marit Westerhuis’s first solo exhibition to open at Groninger Museum

What do you do when you know humanity is threatened with extinction? How do you find meaning in the world? Marit Westerhuis’s first solo exhibition, MEGALITH, focuses on these questions. On view from 9 April to 30 October 2022, the work is especially relevant in light of the climate crisis.

MEGALITH is a large postapocalyptic landscape that stimulates all the senses. Marit Westerhuis (b. 1992, Winschoten, NL) conjures up a world where humans are no longer the most important life form on earth. The exhibition confronts us with the transience of existence. The monuments in the landscape refer to megaliths, large stones arranged by prehistoric humans at ritual sites; examples include the hunebedden in the Dutch province of Drenthe and Britain’s Stonehenge. Westerhuis appears to be asking us: Which future ruins will we leave behind? And how will we be the architects of our own destruction?

This inquisitive stance is typical of Westerhuis, whose work interrogates the relationship between human beings, myth and technology. Since the 18th century, technological revolutions have radically altered the relationship between human beings and the earth. New technologies made it easier to subject the earth to human desires, and the idea of humans as gods was born. But how tenable is this?

The exhibition at the Groninger Museum is the culmination of the third edition of the Young Grunn Artist talent development scheme, set up by NP3 in partnership with the Groninger Museum. The programme provides a platform for emerging young talent.

Concurrently with MEGALITH, Jurjen Galema’s Le Lola nightclub/exhibition will open at NP3’s M0Bi, a former sugar factory site in Groningen. Le Lola will remain on view through 29 May. Galema and Westerhuis were two of the three nominees for the 2021 Young Grunn Artist scheme. Work by the third, Susanna Inglada, will be on view from 12 March in the group exhibition Voorbij de onschuld (“Beyond Innocence”) at the Stedelijk Museum Vianen. Inglada will also take part in the Havana Biennal from 25 March through 30 April.