AERNOUT MIK, MOMA, JULY 2009

Aernout Mik's gripping installations at the MOMA pull apart the fascia of social anxiety. Figures run frantically within violent scenarios as well as from installation to installation. Relationships between crowded bodies, contorted, spasmodic movements, and intensified activity are investigated. Mik is brilliant at pulling disparate real life events into a performative space of interaction through editing. The viewer is made complicit with the action unfolding:we are part of the violence, part of the detritus of a catastrophe, part of a war in which we are privileged viewers in a human scale projection. Mik uses performance and cinema, media and physicality to tear away at actions and events that are chaotic. His instinctive ability to capture what is raw in societal dysfunction threads through his large performance installations. The scale of Mik's work is gigantic- monumental. There is nothing timid about his investigation of random human actions impacting human life without accountability. Mik's world is brutal: here people are animal like, scavengering modern life without narrative continuity. To that extent, Mik's "events" do not have a continuous narrative flow, but rather, are staged as ruptures of perception. Fragments of a life caught digitally and edited into meaning.