Aernout Mik

This summer Stedelik Amsterdam has focused its temporary exhibition in the Dutch artist Aernout Mik .. His training as a sculptor and his high interest in architecture, make the exhibition to become a whole amalgam of videos that form and make an original architecture of the space. 13 video-installations that although each individual acquires and donates his "modus vivendi", to go and see the gallery in all its extension generates a common dimension to all of them.

It is precisely under the name of "communitas" where we can find the work of Mik made ​​in the last decade. As usual, the Dutch artist talks and tells the psychological and social state of society today. The crisis, economic recession, coexistence or failing the "bad coexist

Arnout MIk based part of their Works on the principle of found footage, and more precisely on the recuperation of press photos — and works that are wholly staged, such as Schoolyard (2009), Osmosis and Excess (2005), Park (2002), and Middlemen (2001). These pieces reflect different forms of violence, aggression and tension, and show the diversity of forms of behaviour: gatherings, clashes, rituals and collective obsessions. Shot in Italy, Mik’s latest installation, Shifting Sitting (2010–11), continues his long-standing exploration of the different forms of democracy in Europe.

In Schoolyard 2 video screen show us a dutch high school, where the emotions, tensions and rituals of the emerging dutch society are played out. Young people of various cultural and ethnic backgrounds: dutch, turkish, moroccan and surinamase. Different images are melted, rioting in the suburbs of major cities, public funerals in Ismalic countries or Intifada palestinian. Students, mothers, teachers show us all these virulent and aggressive cross-cultural situations.

Osmosis and Excess impresses you by being a giant and horizontal screen hanging from the ceiling. We observe quantities of medicines that putting together become decorative towers that encourage us to consume. Snuff, hygiene products and medicines all evoke a world of purity and rationality contrasting with a dark floor and worn as well as products open and scattered on the floor. This landscape becomes a quagmire that drag you to a car cemetery. Tijuana and San Diego, two spaces, two cultures, two worlds disconnected but interwoven.

Middlemen, explore the behaviour of a collective in a moment of catasthrope. Scene- stock market in the midst of a crash. All scattered on the floor. Mick creates a choreography of the crisis of capitalism. We are facing a chaotic situation, the agents move as brokers, pointing in his block and look to a display of values. 

Comunitas, Mik's Works are video are performance, are architecture, are document are reality overlapping of fiction. The space in which they are immersed his works are carefully studied and programmed by the artist, and in this way not only the work has an implicit content, but by the look of the spectator completes it with explicit information.