Adriënne Verburg: De muren hebben oren

Lees in het Nederlands

“De benen nemen” (to take to one’s legs/to bolt)—why do we say it that way? Instead of just saying “I’m leaving”? At the same time, people are judged if they don’t speak “correct” Dutch. We accept all sorts of crazy proverbs, yet a tiny grammatical error can sometimes be enough to dismiss someone.

I am fascinated by how we communicate with one another. How we take it for granted. How words follow rules, how objects communicate with us, and how we, in turn, interpret them. And then there are those proverbs, which often describe things whose meaning is no longer literal at all. Do we truly understand each other, or is that not the case and are we just pretending? In my work, I look for the confusion within proverbs sometimes by depicting them literally, sometimes by changing something small about them.

About Adriënne Verburg
Adriënne Verburg (Hengelo, 2000) lives and works in Utrecht. She graduated from the Bachelor of Photography at the HKU (Utrecht University of the Arts) in 2025. She works with various materials, objects, and forms. Due to the fact that she struggled with speaking and reading until the age of nine, communication has become a major source of inspiration for her. She creates work based on her intuition and her perspective on the written, verbal, and visual communication surrounding her. Through her work, she aims to soften the rigid gaze directed at language, focusing on the tension between understanding and confusion.