Bow Flag

As part of Performa 13: Flag New York City, Recess will host Liz Magic Laser and Sanya Kantarovsky’s Bow Flag.

Flag New York City is an outdoor flag project involving 60 international artists, each making a statement with their own specially designed flags, which will be flown in various locations around the city during Performa 13. While the project addresses one of the biennial’s themes this year—citizenship—it also asks key questions about identity and nationality. Flags are strong symbols of power used both in warfare and celebration, with many rituals connected them. The symbolic value in raising or burning a flag is universal, and the use of colors and symbols in flags has a long and complex history, studied in the field of vexillology. The artists involved in the project take on these concerns when exploring the flag as a medium, whilst pursuing the themes of their own work. Flag New York City is curated by Randi Grov Berger and Co-presented by Entrée

The icons on Bow Flag reference postures emblematic of four archetypes, the actor, the citizen, the dictator and the spectator. Each of these gestures was stylized with allusions to Meyerhold’s system of Biomechanics and performed standing atop pedestals and as a spectator in a seated position.

Liz Magic Laser (b. 1981, New York City) lives and works in Brooklyn. She is educated from Whitney Independent Study Program and Columbia University. She has exhibited in venues like Diverse Works, Houston, Texas; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; Lisson Gallery, London; Mälmo Konsthall, Sweden; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia and MoMA PS1, New York.

Sanya Kantarovsky (b. 1982, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in New York. He is educated from UCLA. He has exhibited in venues like Altman Siegel, San Francisco, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany; Marc Foxx, LA, Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Studio Voltaire, London, Office Baroque, Brussels, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Bortolami, New York and Wallspace, New York.