For this year’s edition, two flags are displayed at the front of the building as part of the project What the Flag?!. This temporary presentation brings together works by Alicia Kremser and Cristiana Cott Negoescu, each reflecting in their own way on the meaning, context, and symbolism of the flag. The flags are part of an exchange with Kunsthaus NRW and Art Au Centre.
everything I know to be true, 2025,
Alicia Kremser
from: Art au Centre, Liege (BE)
to: Greylight Projects, Heerlen (NL)
This flag manifests its own belonging to the landscape it inhabits. It acts like a mirror—not in real time, but as a document of its first encounter with light. That moment, shaped by nature alone, ends with the first touch of rain.
The flag is coated in cyanotype: Sensitised in darkness, it begins developing once raised and exposed to sunlight. Wind dictates how much surface catches light, while shaded folds remain water-soluble.
In its uncontrollable appearance of a quiet collaboration between human intention and natural gesture, the work represents a reaching out and understanding what is given. In its very substance, it at the same time is and portrays a moment of connection.
link: https://www.instagram.com/aliciakremser/
Condition: Elsewhere, 2025,
Cristiana Cott Negoescu
from: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)
to: Greylight Projects, Heerlen (NL)
This flag by Cristiana Cott Negoescu reimagines the iconography of sovereignty, fortune, and shared codes of value. At its center is a blindfolded Fortuna—Roman goddess of fate—framed within a shield. Traditionally tied to power, defence, and national identity, such heraldic forms are here repurposed, not as declarations of territory, but as vessels for a symbolic “code of honour.” Rather than asserting dominance, the composition evokes the protection of principle, dignity, and shared belief.
The background—a macro photograph of melting cotton candy—transforms into a swirling cosmic field, a galaxy of sugar dissolving into space. This delicate, ephemeral substance once used to lure, distract, or reward becomes a soft metaphor for the structures that shape collective desire: nations, economies, promises. The tension between the sweetness of illusion and the weight of heraldry encapsulates the fragility of belief systems, political, emotional, and mythic, that bind and divide us.
Responding to the framework of What the Flag?!, this flag resists the expressions of nationalism while appropriating its visual language. It holds space for a code unclaimed by state, gender, or class, an imagined ethical foundation that connects across borders through shared vulnerability and symbolic abstraction. The blindfolded Fortuna echoes not only justice, but the unpredictability of fate, reminding us that connection is neither guaranteed nor neutral. It is a wager, a negotiation, a risk.
Cristiana Cott Negoescu is a Romanian-born artist based in Düsseldorf whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, installation, video, and photography.
link: https://cristianacott.com/
More flag and information about the What the Flag?! project you can find on http://whattheflag.greylightprojects.org/
