Aernout Mik

Aernout Mik’s videos, usually formatted for high-definition horizontal screens and projected in the midst of exhibition architecture of his own design, often make visible the imbalances of power in relationships found in everyday scenarios and actions. This ongoing interest is just as salient in the Dutch artist’s most recent work, Touch, Rise, and Fall, 2008, which depicts a whimsical perversion of security procedures at an airport. Here the potential for violence inherent to searches performed on bodies and belongings is evident throughout: the nervous line of waiting travelers, their reluctant submission to physical contact with metal detectors and latex gloves, and––most absurdly––the invasive examination the airport staff performs on stuffed animals by cutting them open and removing their insides. Mik extrapolates, intensifies, and varies the formal proceedings in these scenes so that the security personnel examine either themselves or objects that, in the process, are completely destroyed. These staged interventions increase the work’s realist overtones, rendering palpable the innate brutality in procedures generally considered harmless.

Although the film utilizes actors in an artificial setting, the artist recognizes it has a documentary quality. Mik sees the work as analogous to a scientific experiment in which subjects experience real feelings in a constructed context, giving rise to an unpredictable dynamic. Osmosis and Excess, 2005, made in the area between San Diego and Tijuana, is similarly unsettling. Panoramic views of hilly suburbs overflowing with cars are superimposed on video images of the extremely muddy floor of a staged pharmacy, in which construction workers wearing dirty overalls occasionally stand and linger. The circulation of goods and people in the border region is translated into peaceful, meditative images that are, nonetheless, disturbingly bizarre.

Translated from German by Jane Brodie.