AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM | PARIS
TOUCH NATURE | FLAG DRAWING

Opening: October 9, 2024, 7 pm (Free registration / rsvp-paris-kf@bmeia.gv.at )
Exhibition: October 9, 2024 - October 26, 2024

Hours: Tuesday to Friday: 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm
Saturday: 10 am to 4 pm
Closed Monday and Sunday

Location: Red Planet Gallery, Rue Duvivier, Paris, France

Curator: Sabine Fellner

-> www.austrocult.fr
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-> More Flag Drawings

The multimedia exhibition Touch Nature , organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum at the Galerie Planète Rouge in Paris, examines how art is positioning itself today in the face of the ecological crisis.

Austrian and French artists curated by Sabine Fellner engage in dialogue and take a critical and feminist look at the profound transformation of our Earth system in the Anthropocene. Painting, graphics, photography, sculpture and video are the artistic media they use to document, protest, raise awareness and conceive hopeful visions of a new relationship between humans and nature.

FLAGS | EVERY POPULATION IS A MULTINATIONAL ORGANISM

This is the title of the approximately 30-part series of medium and large-format colored pencil drawings (along with their digital reproductions) that I began working on in 2019. The total of 206 national flags, according to an alphabetical list of the United Nations, are transformed into speculative forms in my drawings, representing a dream: an anti-hierarchical cooperation of all states, stemming from the factual observation that every population is a multinational organism.

Conversely, there is the nightmare that could materialize in the physical coexistence of all life on this planet, akin to the 2018 film "The Extinction" by Alex Garland—an idea challenging our comprehension. Natural sciences inform us that bacterial strains are constantly changing people, plants, and animals.

Quantum physics teaches us that there are no autonomous particles or bodies in the true sense. The theories of independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist James Ephraim Lovelock (The Man Who Named the World, 1990) and the theories of sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour (ANT – Actor-Network Theory) forcefully introduce an expanded understanding of the possibilities of our planet and all life. The philosopher and literary scholar Armen Avanessian also formulated a speculative realism.

With my series FLAGGEN, I present a speculative surface. In my drawings, I assert that nationhood is an obsolete system of order, akin to a tattered dress lying over a destructive yet renewing planet. While these nation-state garments are maintained by state violence, I weave other narratives into this dress.

My aim is to create anti-chauvinist images. In the large-format drawings, 5-10 national flags are combined in alphabetical order to form organic structures. My first FLAGS (Nos. 1-12) reference the plant photographs by Carl Blossfeldt. At the end of 1920, he published his manipulated plant photographs ("Urformen der Kunst und Wundergarten der Natur"). I counter Blossfeldt's idea that the construction of plants teaches what the ideal state should look like with the current facts of the multinational body politic. As an artist of the "New Objectivity," Blossfeldt was also accused of having paved the way for National Socialism.