What the flag?!

With so many man-made catastrophes befalling and wars raging (close and afar), instantly shared in countless images and videos, a modern-day wanderer finds itself powerlessly contemplating not the sublime, but the horrors of human nature and the eerie landscapes of injustice. Mutating a famed Novalis musing “Everything at a distance turns into / becomes poetry:…

“Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.” – Ben Ehrenreich On invitation of Kunsthaus NRW, Krista Jantowski (artistic researcher at the Reading Room / Greylight Projects) initiated Meeting You In The Margins, a carefully curated selection of books that approach environmental destruction, processes of extraction, and…

The flag by Yann Freichels is a drawing entitled Trotz Alledem [In spite of it all]. It is based on a photograph of Karl Liebknecht, a prominent German socialist and anti-militarist, taken after his assassination. The flag in the drawing transitions from dark (almost black) at the top to light at the bottom, resembling a…

Dorothy is in here, in dorothymania, her own abundance of queer identity making up for her own lost history through sheer quantity in images appropriated from her surroundings and interests. then chewed on and regurgitated onto paper and then collaged into the image of a flag. Dorothy (a.k.a. dorothyinhell) Hendriks is a transwoman and multi-disciplinary…

The signature artistic signature of the artist Lars den Hertog (LDH) signature carefully. As an inspirational point a believed coat of arms of his family was taken. The real coat of arms would surface later after the signature was already completed. The androgynous figures in relation to the plants, candles and skull, which make up…

Eloïse Lega is a multidisciplinary artist who combines traditional techniques like engraving, photography, drawing, etc. with digital techniques like video, electronics, laser engraving, in her installations. Her concerns revolve around the themes of disappearance, the passage of time and the fragility of life. Where am I standing? in the face of inevitable time? En voie…

Inspired by the popular tradition where a padlock attached to a bridge’s fence is believed to seal eternal love between two people, the artwork questions the symbol of unique and monogamous love and its restrictive nature. Here, the padlocks do not bear personal initials but rather the manufacturer’s brand, generic and insignificant. It is the…

To soar free and high, to not be bound on where I stand by the earth’s gentle pull. is a film still from The Revolutions That Did (Not) Happen (2021). Set in 2085, the film suggests a world where social and political structures have collapsed and failed, dealing with topics of social media culture, self-actualization…

Once the view erodes as well is an incomplete look into Lizzie’s home. The reflection provides an insight into a fascination with a place that feels unmakeable. The blurring of what should be inside and what should be outside is a reference to how the environment in which she finds herself seems at once as open…

Taking the topic of Where am I standing? for this year’s What the Flag?! project quite literally, photographer Thomas Weidenhaupt depicts pop singer Balbina standing on a normally busy road. In a bright orange tunnel close to ICC Berlin, the singer is finding herself staged and clothed for the occasion of taking press pictures and…