In her solo exhibition The Flag Bearers, Rachel Monosov draws inspiration from the Surrealist imagery of Edgar Ende (1901–1965). The exhibition takes its title from Edgar Ende’s Die Fahnenträger (1931), one of three paintings which the artist then brings into the present, extracting their symbolic content through sculptural installations and performance. Rachel Monosov looks to Surrealism as a response to the aftermath of the First World War, a movement that abandoned logic and linear views of reality. By turning to dreams and the subconscious, the Surrealist movement offered both a refuge and a means of confronting loss, trauma and human fragility. Through this lens, the artist reflects on the cyclical nature of history while tapping into today’s collective psyche, ultimately exposing the emotional undertones of rising nationalism and the tension between bodies and ideology.
The historical distance between the two artists is consequently central to the work. Edgar Ende lived through a period in which national symbols were transformed into instruments of mass mobilisation. He experienced destruction as a byproduct of nationalism, while Rachel Monosov is working within a contemporary context of escalating conflict where questions of geopolitical power and territorial aggression have again become urgent.
The sculptural installations create an uncanny sensation. Two unusually long benches seem to stretch between here and elsewhere. Strands of long hair lie on their surface like traces of an erased human presence. Prosthetic bird legs have replaced parts of their original structure. Nearby, a jacket hangs from a metal rack, as if waiting to be worn; it is embroidered with a target motif across the back. On the other side of the room stands a metal sphere. Around it, a series of flags. White. Not tied to any particular nation. Their scale is disproportionate to that of the sphere
On the wall, a series of poetic scores written by the artist serves as the common thread; these were intended as choreographic instructions for the performers. Rachell Bo Clark, Cami Brogaard and Victor Dumont activate the sculptural installations through a performative work that acts as the soul of the exhibition. Opening the door to a “mirror within the mirror” universe, they lead visitors into a dreamlike reality where symbolism, exaggeration, the tension between objects and bodies, and free associations compose a metaphor of the collective unconscious through a surrealist perception of space. There is no hierarchy, no beginning or end. Spaces and stories collapse into each other, they are misleading. Everything exists simultaneously, and can only be interpreted through one’s own points of reference and lived experiences.
In The Flag Bearers the artist approaches the present as a historical condition that leaves its traces not only on nations and bodies, but also upon the unconscious. Beneath our individual experiences lies a shared terrain of haunting imagery, repressed guilt, and the uneasy question of what could have been done, or what might still be done, otherwise. Rather than affirming fixed identities, the exhibition places the body in a field of competing symbols, affiliations and projections. The white flags, stripped of any national emblem, are taken up by the performers, who repeatedly shift and unsettle their meaning through movement. Against the backdrop of a fractured political landscape, safety acquires an uneasy undertone. It describes less a state of arrival than a fragile proposition, repeatedly tested through movement, repetition and the collective body.
The Flag Bearers, curated by Jorgina Stamogianni, marks the seventh chapter of the series Becoming B. Across its chapters, Becoming B, a series initiated by Antje Weitzel in her role as Artistic Director, brings Berlin-based artists and curators together in changing constellations, allowing existing practices, encounters and relationships to enter into new contexts. Jorgina Stamogianni and Rachel Monosov bring to this chapter a collaboration that has already been unfolding over the last years through their joint research interests in bodies as sites where power structures and resistance intersect.
Text: Jorgina Stamogianni