REVIEWS AERNOUT MIK
Training Ground, 2006, video installation. Set photo: Florian Braun. © the artist. Collection Dennis and Debra
Scholl. Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, and The Project, New York
The paradox of ‘reality’ TV is that it maintains only a diminished relationship
with reality: constructed scenarios, manipulated behaviour and heavy AERNOUT MIK:
editing fi lter out any elements of reality that don’t correspond to our cultural
taste in entertainment. Likewise, 24-hour news presents an omniscient view SHIFTING SHIFTING
of the world: a simultaneous stream of live events unfolding before our CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE, LONDON
eyes. Yet its continuousness is another illusion achieved only by repeating 16 FEBRUARY – 15 APRIL
and recombining news from a limited set of sources. Events are only
allowed to unfold once they’ve already been deemed interesting enough to
attract viewers.
Aernout Mik’s fi lms mix the informal camerawork and constructed scenarios of reality TV with the looping technique of 24-
hour news. Instead of the tried-and-tested news formula – explosion, shaky camera, pandemonium, body count – there is no clearly
defi ned sequence of events in Mik’s fi lms. Cameras constantly pan around looking for action, while the seemingly unedited real-time
footage creates an almost unbearable tension, which is never resolved in a gory climax.
Nonetheless, a narrative does suggest itself in the ordering of Mik’s four installations at Camden, in the gradual escalation
of expected violence. Training Ground (2006) resembles a TV docu-soap, only there’s no sound and little psychological intrigue. A
group of recruits are drilled in various police exercises, such as searching suspects or using a rifl e. But what should be a straightforward
scenario is undermined in increasingly surreal ways, not least when the role of the recruits and their trainers is transposed, and one by
one the subjects begin to display the unnerving symptoms of epilepsy, catatonic stupor and dementia.
Scapegoats (2006) sets up a post-apocalyptic scenario in a sports stadium, a location that echoes recent images of hurricane
shelters in New Orleans. In Mik’s fi lm, captors and captives engage in ritualistic power games, where torture and mutiny are constantly
suggested but never fully implemented. A sudden burst of gunfi re into the blue sky outside the stadium breaks the video’s silence,
before the camera returns inside, and the unending, nightmarish cycle of choreographed manoeuvres begins again.
Vacuum Room (2005) encircles the viewer within a sphere of screens that, like multiple CCTV cameras, provide dif_f erent
perspectives on the main event: a group of activists penetrating the closed room of a political assembly. Displaying no coherent
agenda, however, their actions appear as unthreateningly stylised and outwardly inexplicable as those of a fl ash mob.
In the fi nal room of the installation, Raw Footage (2006) provides the real-life rationale for Mik’s perceptual games. Although
resembling the other three works in their tense lack of eventfulness, the short fi lms are not constructs, but rather found TV footage
of the war in the former Yugoslavia; the unwanted, in-between-action takes of enervated, tense boredom during street battles that
ITN deemed too dull for viewers. Yet these banal interludes – a lady rushing home with her pram across an eerily silent street; women
soldiers taking a lunch break – are more terrifying than the actual newsworthy events to which we have become desensitised. They take
on a terrible prescience; after all, the next bout of media-sanctioned violence lies at the end of each clip. Jennifer Thatcher
ARTREVIEW one.lintwo.linsix.lin
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