ANTWERP.- The exhibition introduces two remarkable artistic practices concerned with the dilemmas of public art in The Netherlands and beyond. Although belonging to different generations, and conceiving the political responsibility of the artist in distinct ways, the practices of Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal are connected by a sustained polemic within the genre of monumental art, unravelling the political desires and anxieties that monuments thread together and ‘set in stone’, reopening the debates about recent history that monuments seek to terminate. The artists engage the question of the monument overtly – without recourse to the negative prefix and ironic foil of an ‘anti-’, or ‘counter-monument’ – in a critical scrutiny of paradigms of consensus, modes of commemoration and their political instrumentality. While both artists present three recent works, one point of continuit