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.

Press Conference