The exhibition “shifting-shifting” is Aernout Mik’s first in the UK in seven years, and it features four video installations about authority, social identity, and the illegible divide between reality and fiction. Scapegoats and Training Ground (both 2006) and Vacuum Room, 2005, are staged situations that render clearly the arbitrariness hidden behind oppressive behavior. Although presented in distinct social contexts, the dynamic of power evident in these works does not differ: Individuals develop incongruent attitudes defined more by individual caprice than by practical necessity, then seize upon the confusion these decisions sow. Order becomes subtly disconnected from authority in an ironic environment in which police officers wear civilian clothing and a political assembly is transformed by a chaotic, ill-considered protest. The three videos, each play out across multiple low screens, the image flush with the ground, thus changing the visitor’s normal physical relationship to cinematic images. Sound is absent, the images’ definition clear, and the rhythm slow; the stories have no beginning and no end. One might assume one was witnessing events in real time.
Raw Footage, 2006, the exhibition’s last work, is the first video in which Mik deploys found footage. Showing previously unseen clips from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the Dutch artist reveals the daily string of nonevents that constitute a war—a silent, vague terror that suffuses the everyday. One senses the artist is denouncing the paradoxical uncertainty that lies beneath such a seemingly willed act. In comparison with the other works on view here, these real events seem more fictional than the staged ones: Viewers can no longer distinguish between oppressor and oppressed, or authenticity and fabrication, in a context where the brutality of war is shown not through pain and desperation but through an absurd, insipid normality.
