Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo) has come to occupy a singular position in the contemporary art landscape, through embroidered canvases and socially engaged landscape interventions in which concept and form are always tightly interwoven. For Amer, the choice of medium is shaped by a sense of necessity, guided by the degree to which it can most precisely convey a given idea or message. In this way, her practice unfolds from lived experience, encounters with others, and the contingencies that come to bear.
In collaboration with museum in progress, Ghada Amer recently developed a series of four flags that were embedded in the urban fabric and visible from the Stubenbrücke in Vienna, where they interrupted the flow of pedestrians with a direct encounter. Rooted in a shared interest in public intervention, the project shifted also from a site-specific gesture to a printed edition, circulating in a form that will still carry its original context, while recoding it for reappearance elsewhere.
raising flags #38 emerged from Ghada Amer’s sustained engagement with global political realities, an undercurrent that has carried her work for decades. Yet that urgency is rooted elsewhere, closer to the body. Early experiences of war compelled her to draw as a means of survival and as a necessary act. It became a site where the world could not only be endured but, at times, briefly escaped: “I loved drawing, but that experience made it a refuge. It has remained a way for me to cope with anxiety, to escape reality, or to process it. So it’s not about inspiration, it’s a way of living.” That formative impulse continues to course through her practice, positioning the series as both a personal and collective response to a world in upheaval. “It gave me the opportunity to give form to that political anger,” Amer reflects.
In earlier contributions to the raising flags series, artists such as Grazia Toderi, Erwin Wurm, Martha Jungwirth, and Jonathan Monk have tended to approach national symbols at a critical remove. Amer instead pursues a more transparent engagement with the charge of the medium, translating four specific geopolitical crises: the United States, a fragmenting Europe, Burkina Faso, and Palestine. Each flag contains its corresponding colours, underscoring her assertion that “a flag is a flag. It is not just a piece of fabric like a painting. A flag represents identity; it represents something you want to say.”
By approaching the flag as a site of discovery, attuned to its formal and symbolic qualities and its entanglements with power and representation, she used it to test the limits of her own practice, drawn to something she had, in her words, “never really thought about before.” No longer a fixed emblem, the flag becomes an unstable articulation of an identity that is continually produced under pressure across a shifting field of relations. And in turn, discourse follows suit, as Amer’s flags articulate a voice inseparable from the communities they address. “Language is dependent on context, the quote and the intended audience. It is all part of the decision-making process.” This sensitivity informs her use of English across several flags, calibrated for a transnational audience: “Every nation that sleeps in freedom will wake up in slavery” for the European Union, “Your ignorance is their power” for Burkina Faso, and “No empire lasts forever” for the United States. On the Palestinian flag, Arabic operates at a different register of proximity, where the statement “We will not be silent” acquires a heightened sense of intimacy.
Even with elements of distance or abstraction, echoing her QR code series (2023–), Ghada Amer’s flags never fully alienate the viewer. Their formality reflects on how we communicate: seemingly universal, yet collectively disrupted. Still, Amer has consistently resisted the label of activist. “I am not leading a revolution,” she has noted. “I don’t think that is appropriate, even for an artist. People often ask me whether art can change the world. My answer is always the same: no, art cannot change the world. But it can change a person, and that person can then change the world.”
In the margins of her work, Amer reminds us that “censorship exists everywhere.” She emphasised that the project’s integrity relied on its totality: removing even a single flag from the series when presented as a whole would not merely alter its meaning, but fundamentally undermine it. “I cannot censor myself,” she insisted, recalling earlier moments in which critical complexity was readily softened or neutralised once it left the studio. Addressing this, she stressed that censorship is not confined to authoritarian contexts, but remains embedded within today’s ostensibly plural landscapes that continue to determine what can be articulated, shown and ultimately taken seriously.
When Ghada Amer turns to the museum as an institutional category in flux, the discussion shifts towards the fragile mechanics of collective belief and what is understood as collective. “A museum functions because we collectively agree that something is art,” she notes, yet that agreement is never neutral, and is increasingly negotiated under the pressures of shifting policy frameworks and political agendas. Rather than rejecting the institution, such a critique traces the conditions through which legitimacy is conferred and withheld, and remains necessary to its ongoing reconfiguration. The flag crystallises this dynamic by extension, anchored in public space yet perpetually set in motion by competing currents.
In 2026 Ghada Amer’s No Empire Lasts Forever was presented at the Innsbruck International Biennale, while Every nation that sleeps in freedom will wake up in slavery is currently on view at the Cēsis Art Festival in Latvia.