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Indepth Arts News:
"Aernout Mik: primal gestures, minor roles"
2000-01-29 until 2000-05-07
Van Abbemuseum
Eindhoven, ,
NL Netherlands
The Dutch artist Aernout Mik combines the architecture of a given space like a gallery or a museum with video works,
photographs and objects. He doesn't show them on their own, but creates a whole new architecture to show them in.
The combination of the created architectural surroundings and the 'situations' exposed in the individual works plays
an important role. The new architecture not only doubles the real space of the museum (thereby creating a fiction), but
it also seems to extend the video scenes in real time.
The characters in the Aernout Mik films seem to be acting on remote control, mentally absent, as if haunted by an existential doubt.
They move through space like sleepwalkers, outlining a path whose origin and destination are unfathomable; they neither
communicate with each other, nor react to the aggressive interruptions from the outside. The inexplicability of the moment is
stretched out into time, like a mental anamorphosis for which one cannot find the original point of reference.
For the exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum - his first solo exhibition in a museum - Aernout Mik will transform the museum space
into a labyrinth and shifting space. It's the first time that Mik has the opportunity to bring together a considerable number of works
from the period 1991 - 2000 in a vast architectural lay out. Several spatial and visual realities overlap each other: the reality of the
filmed works and the reality of the individuals in the museum, the architecture of the museum and the architecture of the work.
The visitors who find themselves in the space of the museum (which has become the space of the work) are confronted with an
uncanny image: indeed, the programmed, secondary figures projected on the screens resemble in a strange way the presence and the
disoriented coming-and-going of the museum visitors. Here the spectator seems to become an accessory to architecture.
The exhibition is accompanied by the book 'primal gestures, minor roles' with texts from Bernhard Balkenhol, Tijs Goldschmidt,
Jaap Guldemond, Maxine Kopsa and Mark Kremer.
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