Aernout Mik
dal 18/5/2007 al 10/7/2007
Segnalato da
18/5/2007
Aernout Mik
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Shifting, Shifting. An exhibition of four films by the Dutch artist. Vacuum Room, Scapegoats and Training Ground are made according to his signature way of working, with professional, if anonymous, actors. Mik casts them adrift in situations fraught with potential meaning. 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.
Shifting, Shifting
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; an empty 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 through the 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, born 1962 Groningen Lives and works in Amsterdam and has been showing his films regularly throughout the world over the past 12 years, winning the Dutch National Heineken Art Prize in 2002 and shortlisted for the Blue Orange Prize in 2005. He will represent the Netherlands at this year's Venice Biennale
A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Published by Camden Arts Centre in association with The Fruitmarket Gallery; Kunsthall Bergen, Norway and Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, it is designed by Irma Boom (designer of a book recently voted ‘most beautiful book in the world’) and includes an essay by social anthropologist Michael Taussig.
Press and Marketing Manager
Louise Anderson phone 0131 226 8182 email marketing@fruitmarket.co.uk
The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street 0131 Edinburgh
Mon-Sat 11am-6pm Sun 12-5pm