Aernout Mik

An exhibition of four films by renowned Dutch artist Aernout Mik, whose cinematic imagination and unnerving ability to present the truth through supremely banal fictions makes for art which helps us make sense of the world.

Responding to the urgency of war, Mik comments on both aggression and inertia with unseen footage from the conflict in Yugoslavia and a peculiarly familiar fictional account of the aftermath of a disaster. Vacuum Room, Scapegoats and Training Ground are made according to Mik’s signature way of working,with professional, if anonymous, actors. Mik casts them adrift in situations fraught with potential meaning –a political assembly under siege from protestors; anempty stadium in which people appear to have been taken hostage; a police training facility. The actors move more or less aimlessly under Mik’s direction, the camera roving around as the action unfurls, continuously threatening to come to a perpetually deferred conclusion.

Raw Footage is new in Mik’s work, in that it is made from unused documentary footage taken by ITN during the war in former Yugoslavia. Not broadcast at the time, apparently because of its lack of dramatic content, the material tracks the mundane reality of war in an urban, civilian space.

Raw Footage questions what is real or acted out, as well as our relationship with images viewed throughthe mass media. Its reality counterpoints the constructed fictions of the other films. Together, the four works enlist an unsettling sense of recognition, the artist’s work providing a context for a new understanding of human behaviour and experience.

Shifting, Shifting is organised in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre, London.

Aernout Mik
Shifting, Shifting