TRENT, ITALY.- For the first time in an Italian public institution, artist Aernout Mik, one of the most important and complex Dutch contemporary artists, will celebrate a personal exhibition. The works will be shown from November 17th, 2006 to February 25th, 2007, at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento, with a video project and the new production, Scapegoats, realized by the Galleria Civica di Trento in collaboration with the Bak in Utrecht. The work, which uses new and sophisticated technologies, analyzes the experience of war, in the extremity and at the same time, the normalcy of its situations. Shown alongside this work with be the large installation Vacuum Room (2005), a series of six videos that recount a mock political meeting, disrupted by the intrusion of protestors.

Aernout Mik (Groningen, Holland, 1962) uses photography, video, performance, installations, in order to create works in which the images invade the structures, articulating and widening themselves in large, spacious projections, occupying entire walls and often expanding within the spaces via true architectural extensions, integrating aspects of the same work.

Objects of these videos are varied, semi-apocalyptic and surreal disasters, such as structural building collapses (Softer Catwalk in Collapsing room, 1999), physical encounters between false terrorists and guards (Glutinosity, 2001), environmental devastations (Pulverous, 2003) or automobile accidents with catastrophic results (Refraction, 2004). The protagonists are often the film�s characters, placed in apparently regular, but in reality very artificial and intriguing, places or situations. Mik�s analysis is directed at man�s incapacity to face emergency situations, and in fact, at a closer look, disturbing details and unexpected behaviours begin to emerge from initially everyday or reassuring images. The artist�s video camera however indifferently passes through these elements, in an attempt to neutralize them and bring us back to reality, in a continuous game of comings and goings between realism and fiction. In his installations, space and time become altered, precisely like one�s perception of the situation, without a beginning or an end, in a continuous return to different times and meanings.

Obscure and shocking, but at the same time ironic, Mik�s installations put the spectator in front of a difficult situation, without supplying explanations or understandings, instead stimulating it through the repetition of rituals, with which their constant reproposition renders those facts that one witnesses to be normal, or if not plausible.

Born in Groningen, Holland in 1962, Aernout Mik lives in Amsterdam. Beginning from 1987, his work has been exhibited in solo shows in international public spaces, among which the ICA in London (2000), the Van Abbenmuseum in Eindhoven (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2005). Mik has represented Holland twice in the Venice Biennial (1997 and 2001) and has participated in the Berlin Biennial (2001), San Paolo (2004) and Istanbul (2003) and the Triennale of Yokohama (2001). In 2002 Aernout Mik won the prestigious Dutch Heineken Prize.

In occasion of the show, a catalogue will be issued with texts by Fabio Cavallucci and Ann Demeester, and images of Mik�s entire artistic path, edited by Hopefulmonster.

Aernout Mik�s personal exhibition is part of the performative project The Theater of Life, organized with the collaboration of six different curators of international fame, which foresees a series of actions in everyday, life spaces.

Main sponsor of the Galleria Civica of Trento is the Grand Hotel Trento, Boscolo Hotel chain.