Raw Footage, 2006. Images from found documentary material: Reuters and ITN, ITN Source. © the artist. Courtesy of carlier | gebauer, Berlin

Sara Allen watches some video installations dealing with humans under stress at the Camden Arts Centre.

Four new films by fêted Dutch artist Aernout Mik are staging an occupation of the top floor of the Camden Arts Centre. Entitled Shifting Shifting, they can be seen until April 15, 2007.

Mik explores the behaviour of people in groups under stress, in which social norms are disrupted. Combining a keen sense of the absurd and an uncanny connection to world events, the video installations are both challenging and unsettling.

In the newest work, Training Ground (2006), Mik has simulated a brutal police training arena. The images on the vast screen don’t allow the viewers the comfort of knowing whether they are watching acting or reality. And this ambiguity is furthered by the fact that the police are in civilian clothing: without the uniform, their authority is unclear. The unsettled audience doesn’t know if it is watching genuine law enforcement, or illegitimate aggression.

The exhibition path leads the audience through the dimly lit, angular space to Scapegoats (2006). Playing on a similarly large screen, this work is also staged in something like an abandoned stadium.

The film shows groups of people occupying the arena apparently in the aftermath of some kind of disaster. The camera catches their behaviour in such extraordinary (but eerily relevant) circumstances that, as with Training Ground, there is a palpable ambiguity as the roles of prisoner and guard are not constant or easy to discern.

Vacuum Room, 2005. © the artist. Courtesy of carlier | gebauer, Berlin

The third film, Vacuum Room (2005), shows scenes from a political assembly, interrupted by a group of protestors, that descends into chaos. The images are played onto screens arranged in a circle which the audience enters, placing themselves in the narrative and becoming enveloped into it.

The final piece, Raw Footage (2006), is made up film from the ITN’s archives of conflict on the former Yugoslavia. Shown on two vast adjacent screens, the images are disconcertingly banal - footage discarded by the news teams. But they are suddenly interrupted by shockingly real gunfire, and burning buildings in the distance. The ‘soldiers’ firing the weapons are indiscernible from the man driving the tractor laboriously up the street moments earlier.

Mik videos are clearly concerned with anthropology. But that interest does not simply stop with what is on the screen. Instead the installations create space through which the audience moves, locating themselves in response to the films. In fact, one’s relation to the presence, and response, of the other viewers is a powerful part of the experience.

The vast screens are placed close to the floor, demanding that the viewer relates to the narrative, in contrast to a vast cinema screen, for example, which is hung high so that the viewer is invited to simply watch the film. Moving through the room (divided by low walls so that each space feels connected) there is a definite feeling of being implicated in the images.

Scapegoats, 2006. © the artist. Courtesy of carlier | gebauer, Berlin. Set photo: Florian Braun, Berlin

The films are shown in a loop, but the cycles, apparently repeated ad infinitum, are similar but not identical. In this way, the artist seems to be subverting the comforting idea that everything will return.

In a similar way, the absence of narrative wrong-foots the audience, demanding that they take responsibility for narrating the images they watch.

All four films in some way use the iconography of war in slow, silent, jerking scenes that make them simultaneously banal and terrifying. Mik's subjects have uncanny relevance to contemporary political concerns that make the viewer implicate themself in his very disquieting world.

This isn’t an easy exhibition to view, nor a particularly joyous one. But if the rewards of Mik’s films are garnered later, after thought and discussion, it is also true to say that they are worth all the work.