Aernout Mik (1962)
Keeping the viewer alert by throwing reality off track - this is Aernout Mik's goal with his spatial video installations.* The artist puts us face-to-face with our psyche and our deeply engrained behavioural patterns. He presents situations we think we know, but take such strange turns that they leave us ultimately at a loss for an explanation. A number of reference points recur throughout his oeuvre: alienation, social isolation and existentialism. When filming his subjects, he presents them with an explicit idea without giving them too much in the way of instructions. This creates an atmosphere of aimlessness around their actions and gives them space for different interpretations. Take, for example, Mik's film of elderly men fighting, but at such a slow pace that their fisticuffs take on a boyish quality; or another in which he depicts a throng of people absently accumulating on an escalator.
Over the course of his career, Aernout Mik has focused increasingly explicitly on the depiction of the unsettling current events that have a direct impact on our living environment. He has produced works on a market crash, wars, migration flows and hyper consumption. Previously, Mik's work was built on images filmed by the artist himself, but in 2006 Mik also began working with newsreels. The striking aspect of these images that the artist's work reveals is the underlying sense of randomness throughout; evidently reality is less rational than we would like to believe. Mik exhibited these film installations in an architecturally adapted Dutch pavilion during the Biennale di Venezia in 2007.
* H. Den Hartog Jager, ‘Het gevaar komt van alle kanten’, NRC Handelsblad, 08.02.2002
