Jacob Dahlgren’s cunning use of flags
By Jonatan Habib Engqvist

The truth is that Jacob Dahlgren hates decisions. So much that his entire practice revolves around finding ways of avoiding them. The main strategy is commissioning choices to others. But make no mistake. In the act of delegation, there are two political aspects worth pointing out in this context: On the one hand there is a strategy of shared responsibility that arises through devaluation of artistic ego and the involvement of other people in the creative process (by delegating decisions to the participants). On the other hand, the project also becomes a means of revealing, appropriating, or even disempowering the sometimes less obvious political aspects of abstraction as subject matter, simply because the collaborators span from schoolchildren to pensioners.

But flags aren’t neutral. So, however much Dahlgren is delegating, a flag is never merely a piece of cloth. And what stirs in a flag is not just the wind. For many it gathers what cannot be held in the hands: belonging, memory, desire, fear. Power. It is a surface upon which people project themselves until the fabric becomes heavier than its own threads.

The task of a flag is not simply to identify, although it can do so with inaudible certainty. It tells us where we are, or where we might believe that we belong: a nation, an institution, a vessel crossing an indifferent sea. The flag speaks without voice. It can silence and empower. A red field can halt a body before thought arrives. A white one might suspend violence for the brief instant in which hope still can negotiate with inevitability or necessity. The coloured signals of ships drift across distances, translating silence into understanding. A festive occasion.

Flags inhabit ritual. They rise above celebrations, schools, ceremonies, and moments in which people seek to remember themselves together. They are present not because the fabric matters, but because what their abstract patterns awaken.

And there are flags that do not claim a physical territory so much as an inner conviction. They are carried by those who wish to make visible an allegiance to an idea, a community, a struggle, or a dream. In lifting them, people announce not only what they support, but something about who they believe to be.

Perhaps that is the deepest function of a flag: to make the invisible visible. To give form to identity, information, and belief with the simplest of gestures: a piece of cloth that, once raised, becomes more than itself.

Or perhaps, in the end, flags simply are what remain visible. Because whatever they represent mostly began long before they came to exist.

The Flag Project is in the end, less about fabric than about a fragile space that opens when people make something together. The material is the cloth stretched by the wind, but also all those invisible threads that briefly bind one person to another. A conversation, a gesture, the hesitation before choosing a colour, the quiet certainty that no pattern or form belongs entirely to one hand. These are the elements from which the work is composed.

In contemporary art, flags often tend serve as powerful, flexible symbols that artists use to survey questions of national identity, political dissent, and social protest. Perhaps the one who has most eloquently pointed the arbitrary particularity that kind of flag is Eddie Izzard. In the one-man stage performance Dressed to Kill, he illustrates by means of a condensed history of colonialism, that it is not what a flag looks like that is decisive for its symbolical value, rather what it represents:

– Do you have a flag?
– We don’t need a flag, it’s our country!
– No flag, no country. You can’t have one. That’s the rules ... that I just made up

Izzard’s reckless monologue sums up a flag-as-statement that obviously is backed up by a gun. And Izzard, as well as many contemporary artists, manages to talk about oppression through the subversion one of its strongest symbols – the imposed flag of a foreign sovereign power – while ridiculing it and also being hysterically funny (“We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in – I claim India for Britain! They're going You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!”).

In Dahlgren’s cunning use of flags, we’re witnessing a very different strategy. Everyone gets to make their own flag. Here’s a flag that I just made up. Just a flag. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The flag workshops are a beehive of activity. Cutting and gluing coloured paper, the hum of sewing machines and buzzing conversations. Together creating something larger.

Indeed, Dahlgren’s flags appear as evidence of something that already happened. They do not represent a specific community so much as reveal that, for a moment, one was formed. Each flag carrying the memory of an encounter, and each encounter altering the work in ways that cannot be measured by its final form. Thereby shifting the meaning of artistic creation away from the solitary object and toward the shared act of making.

In many ways, Dahlgren’s practice is condensed in the flag project: His reluctancy to taking decisions and the obsession with abstraction also inhabit ritual. These abstractions do not only belong to celebrations, nor to schools or ceremonies, although they pass through them as if they were temporary shelters. The artwork manifests itself when people gather as a way of remembering themselves together. Abstraction stirs what had no language before, something that had been waiting, beneath recognition, until it was suddenly felt.

Yet the artwork is not completed when the flags are sewn or installed. It continues in the relationships that emerge through participation, in the exchange of attention, in the quiet recognition that abstraction can become a language beyond words. What remains, after exhibiting, is not only beautiful images of new combinations of coloured flags. It is the sense that the most enduring material was never the textile itself, but fleeting, necessary connections between people. The invisible form from which everything else is made.