16.10-22.11.2009
In the project which the she waywardly called after the communistic slogan, Natalia Brandt combines flags of different states in a single image. She places the layers of subsequent representations of rectangular flats on a square piece of canvas. She does it in such a way that the flag, painted as the last, is linked with the fragments of two preceding ones. The process of the superimposition of consecutive layers is documented in the series of photographs and a video.
The collection of 49 photographically recorded, coincidental configurations (the order of painting is absolutely arbitrary), links into one various signs and significances, vertical and horizontal stripes, crosses, circles, stars and crescents. The random constellations of forms and colours makes the symbols loose their significance, attributed to them at particular flats. By making such operations on national and state symbols, the artist poises a question, not completely rhetorical: What if there were a single flag, representing a joint patriotism of all the countries?
The artist’s projects makes references to the policy of identity, based upon national emblems, which wavers between the manifestation of national determination and the rhetoric of globalisation, between nationality and trans-nationality, between locality and dislocation. In the European context, this visual game of differences and similarities of overlapping flags, can be read as the metaphor of contemporary tensions, accompanying the idealistic slogans of unification, pronounced all over Europe which never before has seen so many states (and flags) on its map as today.
The artist applied a similar method to her drawings where the lines outline the borders of coloured fields and forms, composing particular flags. The border lines which cross and overlap each other, evoke the fundamental ambivalence of the notions of border and frontier themselves (dividing and sharing). Thus, the discourse on the border embraces the discourse on its annulment and blurring. The utopia of the annulment of borders, formulated in a symbolical dimensions, has no location, no imagined place of its own. It refers to the borders as the subject of political debate or philosophical reflection as much as to the borders set up and abolished in one’s imagination, including the borders which, as the artists adds, divide Alice from the things on the other side of the Looking-Glass.
The presented project, has 49 flags and is in realisation; the artist is going to continue it as long as all of the existing national flags have been united in a single painting.
Natalia Brandt (DOB 1983) graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań this year. Her exhibition at the Profile Gallery launches a cycle of annual presentations of the youngest generation of artists.
