The works of the artist Aernout Mik, who was born in Groningen in the Netherlands in 1962, almost always radiate a holy seriousness, although or precisely because representatives of state power, such as ballet dancers in Swan Lake, often perform surreal choreographies.

In this respect, it does not seem far-fetched that the video installation “Threshold Barriers” from 2022, conceived especially for the exhibition and divided between two and three screens in the darkened large hall of the Frankfurt Schirn, as well as “Double Bind” from 2018, which in the hall is inspired by a diagonal “pew ’ are separated, to be perceived as a quasi-sacral diptych and triptych.

Like the monumental Passion altars and depictions of martyrs in the churches of earlier times, the two equally large-format and multi-part flickering tableaus Mik show images of violence,

Half a century of impotence

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Mik explores suggestive images of the threat that one encounters every day on television and in newspapers: images of terrorist attacks and the reactions to them or the powerlessness in the face of them, as they have been since the Palestinian assassination attempts on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 and the fatally unsuccessful, helpless ones police forces standing around are burned into the German visual memory.

In the two-part video “Threshold Barriers”, which already in the title evokes fear of the unknown and barricades, Mik, for the purpose of exaggerating identification, increases the often conflicting encounter between society and state power, here specifically demonstrating citizens and police forces, into the surreal: in the open one After the fight, completely exhausted demonstrators and police officers mingle in a Kafkaesque manner through barriers and bamboo tubes to a labyrinth of views, expressing solidarity and seeming to meet at eye level.

One protester wears a metal protective mask like Doctor Doom from the Marvel Comics universe, while others made of umbrellas appear to recreate the Roman military's turtle formation or use an umbrella stick to simulate a shooting gun.

In contrast, in the three-part video “Double Bind”, whose sounds constantly waft into the silent “Threshold Barriers”, Mik says he wants to question the failure of institutionalized structures of authority and the security they promise.

Specifically, an anti-terrorist unit in Rennes, France, can be seen on three parallel image channels, which is as martially armed as it is dysfunctional and is tackling an invisible enemy.

Only at the end of the film does Mik briefly show the viewer half a dozen terrified civilians in a doorway who the surrounding special unit claims to be protecting.

However, judging by the terrified faces of the survivors of the alleged attack, she cannot keep the promise.

Images repeat themselves in a fatal way

The fact that sheer chaos reigns in the video and there is no comprehensible plot of coordinated action by the police force makes the helplessness of state reactions to “invisible”, at least asymmetrical terror all the more painfully palpable.

For example, Mik lets the anti-terrorists, who are all dressed in black, crawl out of the police van at extremely slow speeds, so that in their combat gear they look like giant insects with rigid chitin shells.

Repeatedly moaning, as if overwhelmed by their own powerlessness and pressed to the ground, they squirm on the verge or the street, rub their faces along the asphalt or press their heads against a granite house wall.