Katie Kitamura
www.smba.nl
Aernout Mik’s most ambitious work to date,
Reversal Room (at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam) is a dense,
carefully choreographed video installation. It is a gratifying piece, in
that it is easily identifiable within Mik’s body of work, but successfully
furthers and thickens the arguments and themes that are set up in the
earlier work. All the trademark Mik motifs are in attendance, but with a
greater finesse and deliberation. The piece is also brilliantly executed on
a technical level, the video and the installation aspect being equally
impressive.
Projected onto five screens circularly arranged, Reversal Room is split into
two parts. In the first, the video scans a busy kitchen. The hypernormalcy
of the scene is punctured by a ghostly set of ‘visitors’: several women
stand listlessly in one corner, a man sleeps on a pile of potatoes. The busy
kitchen staff seem oblivious to the ghostly antics that transpire across the
room; it is the contrast between these two realities that makes the
panoramic video at once entertaining, puzzling, and unnerving.
The second half of the video features the interior of a Chinese restaurant;
first one brawl, then another, breaks out between the staff and two
customers. Tables are knocked over, punches are thrown, but, throughout, the
remaining customers in the restaurant fail to register any reaction. The
scene repeats itself endlessly, multiple perspectives thrown up onto the
five screens.
There is no connection between the restaurant dining room and the kitchen,
and this split is in some senses what the work is about. Mik’s work inserts
a gap into the landscape of everyday reality, whether it is the behavioural
gap between an action and its expected reaction, or a gap in logic, as in
the failed connection between the restaurant and the kitchen.
This motif plays itself out visually as well. In the kitchen scene, the
screens are connected so that the frieze-like image travels from one to the
other – except that the images are not entirely continuous, and there are
again strange gaps of missing visual information. The effect is haunting,
something like the ruptured narrative, the split vision, of a traumatised
amnesiac.
The presupposition of normalcy and convention behind the viewer’s attempt to
establish a narrative is crucial to rendering visible these rifts, which,
once perceived, make the assumption of the everyday seem gratuitous. The
work makes reality strange, shuttling it into a territory that eludes reason
or aesthetics.
But the greatest strength of his work finally lies in its capacity to
infiltrate the viewer’s own perspective – that is, in its sympathetic
humanity. The installation plunges you into the various sensations of
vertigo, claustrophobia, humour, and nausea, and these feelings stay with
you beyond the space of the gallery.
aernout mik: Reversal Room was at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, 2 February – 17 March 2002.