Aernout Mik
2021Aernout Mik (b. Groningen, 1962) is widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary Dutch artists working today. Originally educated as a sculptor, Mik has combined architecture, performance, and social commentary in a distinctive, twentyfive- year career that has forged a unique and influential place in the history of art. His work is widely exhibited internationally; his last major survey was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2009.
Shifting Sitting (for Spinoza)
Aernout Mik
In Shifting Sitting, Mik continues to reflect on the various faces of democracy in Europe. The figure of Berlusconi and the collapse of the boundaries between politics, jurisdiction and the media are key elements of the work. Shifting Sitting was filmed in Rome’s EUR quarter (Esposizione Universale di Roma), which was built by order of Mussolini in the late 1930s. Presented on three separate screens, the video installation focuses on different types of gatherings, in which it contrasts rigid with more fluid structures. The scenes are set in a court of law, where five men (businessmen or politicians, some of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to Berlusconi) are being questioned. The complete cast comprised some 120 actors and extras.
Shifting Sitting (for Spinoza)
Tongues and Assistants
Aernout Mik
The scenes in Tongues and Assistants are not staged. They are a registration of a large Pentecostal church gathering in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mik focuses well on the small absorbed movements and the public (auto staged) displays of ecstasy of those attending. This way, he is able to exaggerate what is happening and draw focus to it, to an extent even control it.
Tongues and Assistants
Softer Catwalk in Collapsing Rooms
Aernout Mik
In Softer Catwalk in Collapsing Rooms, Mik’s characteristically confused, quasi-mechanically moving ‘extras’ move slowly through a building’s interior until, bit by bit, in collapses into a ruin – a little like the structures through which visitors to Mik’s work must often venture.
Softer Catwalk in Collapsing Rooms
Glutinosity
Aernout Mik
Glutinosity, 2001, depicts a stage resembling the context of a riot and social masses as politic actors: uniformed crowd pulls and pushes the bodies of another group which seems to be glued together, presenting a single multifarious human mass. These strength and counter strength create a choreography around the density of the crowd and the weight of the crowded bodies.
Glutinosity
Float
Aernout Mik
The installation "Float" consists of a video projection and a sculpture with an extra. The video shows how an expressionless man and woman, lying on their stomachs in an indefinable space (grey floor, brick walls), are tossed up and down in an unremitting rhythm, as though they lay in a cart rolling over a bumpy road at high speed. For the viewer, the repeated and fundamentally physically unpleasant experience gradually gives way to acceptance of the situation, through which the up and down movements even begin to assume a calming quality. The sculpture in the same space in Bureau Amsterdam, into which an extra is introduced, continues the horizontal structure of the video, but is opposite in character: apparently tranquil, but rumbling in the underbelly.
Float
Zone
Aernout Mik
Zone shows a group of children in a desolate piece of urban land. Besides their behavior as children, they seem to act as tramps. For example they attempt to make a bed out of cardboard boxes, but also pelt each other with them. Franzson's sombre, repetitive music enhances the sinister atmosphere of Mik's film, while the images give an extra charge to the music, which consists of improvisation on ceramic windpipes and double bass. The low, constant tone of the windpipe, played by the composer himself, has its equivalent in the highly repetitive nature of Mik's work. Franzson wanted to imitate the sound of the wind till the point were nature meets culture.
Zone
Raw Footage
Aernout Mik
Raw Footage is an assemblage of television footage shot during the civil war in former Yugoslavia but discarded by the news agencies not particularly interesting or useful for the purposes of coverage. Commonplace but incredible at the same time, the scenes bear witness to the war in all its “rawness” with non-manipulated images, as the title of the work suggests. Soldiers and civilians intermingle. Shooting and fires form a background to the actions of ordinary people doing their jobs or walking through the streets.
Raw Footage
Schoolyard
Aernout Mik
Schoolyard is set at a Dutch school with a very mixed assemblage of race. It mirrors the tension we have now in our communities in Holland. It’s presented in a great space at the Museum. Behind the screens is the Sculpture Garden, and when it’s open, you can see people walking in the Garden behind the screens, while you watch the people in the film. and then there are people walking in front of the screens. There are all these different layers to reality.
Schoolyard
