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. 

LIVING LINES by Harmattan Theater, SoHo, june 6, 09

The Living Lines Project is an experimental project in documenting human movement against the built environments in different scales of urban mapping.  Taking three principles of distance as a working logic: the close up, the long shot and the hand held camera, three illustrators mapped the DeSalvio Playground in real time.  Drawing the outlines of animate and inanimate landscapes across different fields: horizontal, vertical and perpendicular, as well as in states of stasis and motion, the installation captures an intrinsic moment in time.  The drawings were executed with black in on Mylar and Acetate.  They were hung across the park as a clothesline, citing NoLiTa's history of italian immigrant life and its domestic visuality of hanging clotheslines.

The Living Lines project opens up the scales of interaction as distinctive threads of movement that collide, overlay, superimpose and eventually, melt away against the throbbing urban bustle.  The installation was created by Victoria Marshall, Jose De Jesus and May Joseph, for HarmattanTheater.