On October, 29th Aernout Mik‘s new video installation Communitas will be presented for the first time in Germany at carlier | gebauer gallery. Communitas was realized in 2010 on the invitation of the Teatr Dramatyczny, in the Cultural Palace in Warsaw and premiered at the Sao Paulo Biennial in September.

Aernout Mik‘s newest work Communitas was shot in the summer of 2010 in the Cultural Palace (Pałac Kultury i Nauki) in Warsaw on the invitation of the Teatr Dramatyczny, which is located there. The building, known for being an ambivalent ,gift‘ of the Sowjet Union to Poland after World War II, is part of a contemporary debate, which deals with its possible demolition. Communitas was filmed entirely inside of this hermetically enclosed architectural structure. The title Communitas refers to a concept, which stems from the field of cultural anthropology and defines a sociality in its coming into being as a joined and euphoric experience of passage.

Aernout Mik’s actors, composed from Polish citizens and Vietnamese migrants (and this choice of personage as well documents a present debate on inclusion and exclusion in Polish politics) have occupied the Cultural Palace. They have taken over different rooms and halls, have prepared provisional sleeping berths, are eating, debating, voting, discussing and enact countless gestures of political insurgency. Oversized posters, carrying the counterfeits of individuals are hanging from the architectonically protruding tribunes of the main hall. An air of revolutionary uprise surrounds the actions, as well as a sense of fear of an undeterminable threat from the outside: the building as a bunker, with its countless congress halls, corridors, stages, surrounded by galleries and tribunes, lined with thick textiles, reaching high up towards the ornamented and adorned ceilings in itself represents a political gesture of the past in which the megalomania of this hermetical inside is represented as political theatricality. Mik‘s work evokes images of political upheaval, a non-spectacular lineage of political processes and negotiations, but also drastic images as that of the hostage-taking in Moscow‘s Dubrowka theatre in 2002, in which the theatre became the backdrop for actions of terror and those of the state‘s executive forces. With Communitas, Mik creates a multi-referential continuum of spaces and actions, which lets frames of contemporaneity blur and leads its viewer into a self-referential delirium of political and architectonical gestures.