Citizens and Subjects: The Netherlands, for Example

In 2007, Aernout Mik represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. Rather than produce a standard catalogue to accompany Mik's acclaimed three-part video installation, curator Maria Hlavajova organized this dense and galvanizing critical reader. Interspersed with provocative black-and-white images from Mik's artworks, Citizens and Subjects looks at the Netherlands as an example of the contemporary western condition at a time when the demands of "national security," the normalization of violence and the maintenance of high levels of fear and anxiety have become part of daily life in the so-called "West." This volume seeks to identify the causes of our current predicament and looks at how our society fails to negotiate the challenges posed by economic globalization, human migration and cross-cultural influence. With contributions by philosophers, social scientists and artists including Marlene Dumas, Aernout Mik, Willem de Rooij and Lawrence Weiner.

Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Capetown, South Africa. After studying at the Michealis School of Fine Arts there, she relocated to the Netherlands, where she studied in Haarlem and Amsterdam. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

Born in the Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1962, Aernout Mik has shown widely in Europe and was represented at the biennials of Sao Paolo (1991), Venice (1997, 2001), and Melbourne (1999). In the United States, he has mounted installations at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and Cornell University.

Lawrence Weiner was born in 1942 in the Bronx, New York. Upon graduating from high school, he worked in a variety of jobs--on an oil tanker, on docks, and unloading railroad cars--and then traveled throughout North America before returning to New York, where he exhibited at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery in 1964 and 1965. Since the 1970s, wall installations consisting solely of words in a nondescript lettering have been a primary medium for Weiner. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., ICA London, Dia Center for the Arts in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others. Weiner lives in New York and Amsterdam.