Visitors entering MoMA to see the newly opened retrospective of Dutch video artist Aernout Mik may be surprised to find themselves handed a fold-out treasure map. Instead of being neatly grouped in a single gallery space, eight of Mik's unusual videos are secreted throughout the museum, from the basement theater to the top floor. But while the 'x' marks on the map suggest buried loot, the looped films are actually sites of a different kind of concealment--images and scenes of political traumas that are embedded in the modern psyche.

Working with a mix of professional actors, friends, and bystanders--much like Jeff Wall--Mik creates unsettling looped films, mostly silent, where little seems to happen. But the settings and the dress of the people onscreen unmistakably evoke front-page news events of the recent past, from the tragic hostage crises in Beslan and Moscow's Nord Ost theater to the Superdome of Hurricane Katrina to the sometimes violent struggles of Muslim immigrants in the artist's native Holland. Some, like Raw Footage outside the Titus theater (the only sound video) explicitly show soldiers firing weaponry in a war zone, in this case the former Yugoslavia. Others are vaguer, a dreamlike melange of events. The six-screen Vacuum Room, for instance, shows a ragtag militia-like group that has seemingly taken over a government assembly room, but as the film progresses the roles seem to reverse as the hostage-takers pull their shirts over their heads, conjuring the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

Proving their worth as art, many of the films transcend their immediate context to apply to the present day. Middlemen, a 2001 work showing disheveled men slumped around a paper-strewn trading floor, brings to mind the current malaise on Wall Street. But for a respite from all the crises on view, viewers can seek out Fluff , the earliest work--from 1996--that presents a scene of mounting hilarity rather than unease: men in a furniture store who lounge, take off their clothes, and are unaccountably pelted every so often with pieces of "fluff." Another experimental high point in the recent spate of groundbreaking shows at the museum, Mik's retrospective will introduce New Yorkers to a brand of art many haven't seen before.

"Vacuum Room" video still ; Courtesy of the artist, carlier | gebauer, Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art

"Schoolyard" video still ; Courtesy of the artist, carlier | gebauer, Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art