The work of the British artist Mark Wallinger  is very diverse. Though trained as a painter, he also employs the media of photography, video, performance, sculpture and installations. In addition to this, language plays a significant role. In his work Wallinger raises social, political and religious issues, often with remarkable lightness. With the much-discussed State Britain, he won the Turner Prize in 2007. Measuring forty-three meters in length, this work now comprises the core of his exhibition at De Pont—the first to be held in the Netherlands.   In State Britain hundreds of banners, war photographs, protest signs, bloodstained articles clothing, stuffed bears and flags are strung across the exhibition space. The work is a meticulous reconstruction of the ‘wailing wall’ with which peace activist Brian William Haw (1949-2011) gave power to his protest on Parliament Square in London for many years. When Wallinger photographed his sprawling protest in early 2006, Haw had already been camping out across from the Palace of Westminster for five consecutive years, in order to draw attention to the humanitarian disaster brought about by the sanctions against and war in Iraq.   Wallinger had great admiration for Haw’s tenacity; the visual impact of his wall of protest must certainly have contributed to the fact that he documented it carefully. An urgent need to turn this into a work of art only came later, however, when police dismantled the entire camp on the morning of 23 May 2006. For this specific purpose, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act had been passed: a law prohibiting unauthorized demonstrations within a one-kilometer radius of the government buildings.   About six months later Wallinger exhibited State Britain in the Duveen Gallery of Tate Britain. The meticulously copied version of the protest wall had been transformed, from an indictment of the war in Iraq, into an artwork which then raised and, even today, still raises many questions concerning function and meaning.

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