Aernout Mik Communitas
Curated by Sabine Maria Schmidt (Museum Folkwang), Marta Gili (Jeu de Paume) and Leontine Coelewij (Stedelijk Museum)
In close cooperation with Museums Folkwang, Essen, Jeu de Paume, Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, war organized a major retrospective of the Dutch artist Aernout Mik. The exhibition took initially place in Paris at the end of March, 2011, in October in Essen and after the opening of the new Stedelijk 2012 in Amsterdam.
The exhibition has shown a demanding overview of his works from the last ten years with a special focus on his more recent film and video productions and those works not yet exhibited in Germany. These include the video installation Communitas, recently made at the Culture Palace in Warsaw at the invitation of the Teatr Dramatyczny and which premiered at the Sao Paulo Biennale in September 2010. For each work and station, the artist developed a specific exhibition structure. A high point of the retrospective in the Museum Folkwang was the new video installation Shifting Sitting, specially made for this project.
Aernout Mik (born 1962 in Groningen) is among the most important artist in the Netherlands. His spatial and video installations, with their numerous crossovers between film, video, performance, sculpture and architecture, has fundamentally extended the use of moving pictures. In a unique way, Aernout Mik’s works reflect the psycho-social state of our society and our times. His works often refer to current political and social situations and their coverage in the media. Thus you find topics such as current wars, global crises, economic depressions, racism and social tensions, without their being photographed directly.
With the exhibition an extensive catalogue was being published by Steidl Verlag (in French, English and German editions) with specific texts of an amount of authors on the individual installations, and numerous illustrations.
Runa Islam
First Day of Spring, 2005
16mm film with sound, 7 minutes
Produced by the Government Art Collection
Courtesy of Runa Islam and Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)
Runa Islam (with Tobias Putrih)
Restless Subject
29/11/2008 – 25/01/2009
Museum Folkwang, Kahrstrasse 16, 45128 Essen, Germany
The Museum Folkwang, Essen is presenting the first German solo exhibition, entitled Restless Subject, of the artist Runa Islam, born in 1970 in Dhaka, Bangladesh and living in London. The medium of film is the center-point of her work.
The exhibition in the Museum Folkwang is taking place simultaneously with an exhibition in the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Museum Folkwang’s partner in this project, which shows the same selection under different spatial conditions. Both institutions commissioned a new production to the artist.
Apart from the new realized short film about an old photograph from the family album of the grandfather of the artist, the exhibition in Essen shows First Day of Spring (2005), an impressive cinematic group portrait of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Assault (2008), The house belongs to those who inhabit it (2008) as well as the double video projection Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot) (2003). All works present different ways of the art of portrait in a wider sense.
For the film “The house belongs to those who inhabit it”, the Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih (*1972) has developed a specific installation at both venues, as part of the artists ongoing collaboration in 2008. Runa Islam has been nominated this year for the renowned “Turner Prize” and has participated in important international exhibitions such as “Manifesta 7″ in Trento.
Runa Islam deconstructs linear narrative patterns and passages of time, placing the act of seeing – both in the sense of regarding as in that of recognizing – in the center of her work. She is concerned to question cinematic illusions and to expose structures fundamental to our society, which are, however, not at first glance recognizable. Runa Islam’s films captivate with their sharp analysis and their poetry.
For the exhibition, Museum Folkwang brought out together with the Kunsthaus Zürich a monograph with an elaborated interview by Mirjam Varadinis of Runa Islam and a text by Sabine Maria Schmidt, 168 pages, german and english version, with numerous color illustrations, produced at Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Price: 28 Euro.
Curators: Sabine Maria Schmidt (Essen) and Mirjam Varadinis (Zürich)