Aernout Mik

Contested spaces are Aernout Mik’s stock-in-trade—from New York trading floors before 9/11 to the former Yugoslavia as it splintered. At his best, he suggests a polemical position without being didactic, and he turns media images blunted by their ubiquity into newly resonant contemporary visions. His latest video, Communitas, 2010, is among his best.

Communitas unfolds inside Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, which was built by the Soviets as a gift to Poland after World War II. Mik deploys his signature strategy: Through multiple views of the same events, he suspends viewers somewhere between participation and omniscience, inside a tense world without sound. His huge cast, comprising Poles and Vietnamese immigrants, appears to have taken over the palace. The building is filled with a spirit of revolutionary euphoria: Political banners hang from theater balconies; short plays are enacted; idealistic teenagers huddle together; makeshift councils are formed; statements are hastily agreed on and read out loud; votes are taken.

There are shades of the lead-up to 1989, when radical theater and student movements in communist countries played essential roles in fomenting free expression. But Communitas also has contemporary significance. The inclusion of Vietnamese immigrants is a deliberate reference to the current debates about their place in wider Polish society. This is a pattern repeating itself across Europe; as the continent limps toward its new, postcrash reality, ethnic minorities are facing scrutiny not just in former communist states but also in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The Polish situation, then, is but one piece in a much larger puzzle. By suffusing Communitas with revolutionary energy, Mik doesn’t just create a space for a fictional argument; he also exposes some of the cracks that are emerging in Europe’s liberal facade.