Aernout Mik | Vacuum Room
13th September – 29th October 2005, Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Vernissage: Saturday, 10th September, 6 p.m.

On 10th September carlier | gebauer will be inaugurating two new solo exhibitions. Beside a selection of current works by Marko Lehanka (Arch 51), we will present Vacuum Room (2005), Dutch artist Aernout Mik’s most recent video installation (Arch 52).
 
Aernout Mik (*1962) has already exhibited in numerous European art institutions. Internationally, his work has been shown at Biennales in Saõ Paolo (1991 and 2004), Venice (1997 and 2001), Melbourne (1999) and Istanbul (2003). Since 2003 Mik has also increasingly had solo exhibitions in the USA, most recently at the New Museum in New York and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2005). Currently on show at inSite_05 in San Diego/Tijuana and in the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Mik’s work will also be one of the focal points of our presentation at this year’s Frieze in London.
Mik’s installations combine performance and sculpture, moving images and architectonic elements in environments visitors can walk through, being kept in a state of flux between various dimensions of reality and experience. In addition to the sculptor’s fascination with mass and space, Mik is particularly intrigued by the social dynamism of groups, by the unstable relationships between bodies, gestures, behaviour and the environment.
Vacuum Room (2005), a co-production by Argos in Brussels and the Centre pour l’image contemporaine in Geneva, depicts scenes from a political assembly between chaos and stasis, ostensibly disrupted in its cohesion by the arrival of a group of young protesters, and continually threatening to disintegrate. The images of the conference room come from six simultaneously filming CCTV cameras distributed around the room and will be shown synchronised as life-size projections in the exhibition. Here, as in Mik’s other works, the rejection of classical cinematic narrative conventions and the renunciation of any form of dialogue or sound reveal the effects of human behaviour in all their inconsistency, outside any type of psychological or rational explanatory framework. 

For detailed press information and photos, please contact us by phone +49 (0) 30 280 81 10.