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Indepth Arts News:
"Aernout Mik: Shifting Sitting"
2011-03-01 until 2011-05-08
Jeu de Paume
Paris, ,
FR France
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Jeu de Paume (Paris) and Museum Folkwang (Essen) have jointly commissioned Aernout Mik to create a new work: Shifting Sitting. The video installation will be the centerpiece of a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work over the last thirteen years. The exhibition has been devised in close collaboration between the three international partners and the artist, and opens at Jeu de Paume at the end of February. 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 play a key role in the work. Shifting Sitting was filmed in Rome’s EUR quarter (Esposizione Universale di Roma), which was built by order of Mussolini at the end of the 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 law court 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.
Aernout Mik (Groningen, 1962) is renowned for his works combining video, performance and architecture. Intrigued by social and psychological relations, his work is a penetrating portrayal of contemporary society. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam maintains close ties with the artist, and has followed Mik’s artistic career from its earliest stages beginning―resulting in eight works by Aernout Mik in the museum’s collection. An artist of international standing, Mik has held solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world, including New York, London, Hannover and Chicago.
Mik made Shifting Sitting at the request of Jeu de Paume, the Museum Folkwang and the Stedelijk Museum, and with the support of the Netherlands Foundation for the Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, the Netherlands Film Fund, and the European Cultural Foundation. After its presentation in Paris the survey exhibition will be on view in Museum Folkwang in Essen, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
The title of the exhibition, Communitas, is taken from Mik’s penultimate work. The term ‘communitas’ is borrowed from anthropologist Victor Turner and refers to a transitional phase that transcends ordinary social order, a moment when all members of the group are equal and temporarily united by a sense of togetherness and solidarity.
The retrospective is accompanied by an exhaustive publication charting the work of Aernout Mik since 1999. It contains an interview with the artist, contains essays by Mariá Hlavajová, Christian Höller, Merijn Oudenampsen and Irit Rogoff and others, and texts by the exhibition’s curators Leontine Coelewij (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Sabine Maria Schmidt (Museum Folkwang, Essen) and Marta Gili (Jeu de Paume, Paris). The publication is published by Steidl Verlag and designed by Mevis and Van Deursen.
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