The flag has a long tradition of different uses and meanings. Flags are commonly used to transmit signals, to identify countries, regions or cities, or to visually demarcate a territory. Flags are also frequently used to represent political ideas and beliefs. The artists participating in the What the Flag!? project are asked to respond from their own work and vision of the medium flag. What the Flag!? is well-established in Heerlen, being organized each year by Greylight Projects. In the past few years the project was expanded once more, crossing borders and now including Very Contemporary’s art institutions as partners, each one presenting a flag, which was previously commissioned by another partner in the network and randomly assigned to yet another partner.


Now, shaking things up even more this year, all participating artists have to fulfil the rules of NAK and STAWAG’s Young Art Euregion series. Hence they cannot be older than 40 years and have to have a strong connection to the Euregion. Again, those artists are chosen by the Very Contemporary institutions, art organizations and museums in the Euregion. Whereas beforehand the flags would be directly exchanged between the institutions, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein presents all flags grouped together in one exhibition, taking place at the Kunstverein.

Lars den Hertog, “The signature of LDH”, 2024

From: Nieuwe Domein, Sittard (NL)
To: Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (DE)

The signature artistic signature of the artist Lars den Hertog (LDH) signature carefully. As an inspirational point a believed coat of arms of his family was taken. The real coat of arms would surface later after the signature was already completed. The androgynous figures in relation to the plants, candles and skull, which make up the other parts of the signature are representations of his interests and the topics he works with. Such as love, eroticism, melancholy and questioning genders. By deciding to create and use a signature, which is also based on his family history, LDH plays with the idea of degenerating family status in a Decadentistic tradition.


The combination of these layers should be perceived as a critique on traditional ideas of masculinity and patriarchal structures. Afterall, knowledge of the past influences how we position ourselves in the general public and how we can add to a more healthy, inclusive and understanding society. Growing up in a patriarchal world, with a very tense relationship with his father causes the urge for LDH to question the patriarchal structures and the role and definition of the man as a gender.


LDH, Lars den Hertog 1996, operates as a painter, poet and performer amongst others. After graduating from his master in fine arts and design at Maastricht Institute of Arts in 2020 he took the initiative to organize exhibitions and poetry events. In his work LDH is occupied with the big topics of love, melancholy, decay and how these are intertwined with masculinity and patriarchal structures. This results in work which questions what benign a man in our contemporary society means and how man as a gender must be repositioned towards the other genders and redefined.

Silvia Martes, “To soar free and high, to not be bound on where I stand by the earth’s gentle pull”, 2024

From: Leopold Hoesch museum, Düren (DE)
To: Nieuwe Domein, Sittard (NL)

To soar free and high, to not be bound on where I stand by the earth’s gentle pull. is a film still from The Revolutions That Did (Not) Happen (2021). Set in 2085, the film suggests a world where social and political structures have collapsed and failed, dealing with topics of social media culture, self-actualization and individuality. By fantasizing about the future the artist exposes the shortcomings of the present.


Silvia Martes (b.1985 in Amsterdam, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam, with a practice focused on film and video-art. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam from 2019 to 2021. In 2021 she was shortlisted for Prix de Rome and in the same year was the winner of the Theodora Niemeijer Prize. The artist most recently had solo exhibitions at Museum De Pont in Tilburg and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. Martes has completed artist-residencies in Ukiha & Tokyo (JAP), Aruba, Oldenburg (DE) and London (GB). In 2023, her first retrospective solo exhibition took place at the Edith Russ House for Media Art in Oldenburg. She has also participated in exhibitions at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2022), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2021) and EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2020), among others.

Lizzie Veldkamp, “Once the view erodes as well”, 2024

From: Schunck, Heerlen (NL)
To: Art au centre, Liège (BE)

Once the view erodes as well is an incomplete look into Lizzie’s home. The reflection provides an insight into a fascination with a place that feels unmakeable. The blurring of what should be inside and what should be outside is a reference to how the environment in which she finds herself seems at once as open as it is closed.


Lizzie Veldkamp born 1998 in Kerkrade (NL) and living and working in Heerlen (NL), searches in her practice for a re-evaluation of imperfection. By working with found materials, documentation and researching social processes within urban transition, she tries to question what relationship people have with their environment. She collects, as it were, the “crumbs” of change.

Zoé Médard, “libérer l’amour”, 2024

From: Art au centre, Liège (BE)
To: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)

Inspired by the popular tradition where a padlock attached to a bridge’s fence is believed to seal eternal love between two people, the artwork questions the symbol of unique and monogamous love and its restrictive nature. Here, the padlocks do not bear personal initials but rather the manufacturer’s brand, generic and insignificant. It is the presence of the key on the padlock that offers a different interpretation of the symbol. Here, nothing is eternal; one can break free without constraint. As a result, the concept of a breakup no longer exists. By transposing the motif of the bridge’s fence onto that of a flag, the intention is to reinforce, declare, or even advocate for this vision of love.


Zoé Médard (Ostend, 1993) lives and works in Brussels. Trained in video and drawing in Liège, her practice is multifaceted and transdisciplinary, incorporating video, drawing, objects, and installations. Both intimate and political, her work addresses issues of ambivalence, indecision, and nostalgia. With a sense of humor, she aims to evoke these emotions in her audience.

Rachel Bacon, “The disappearing mountain (Limburg, 1945)”, 2024

From: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)
To: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (DE)

“Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.” – Ben Ehrenreich

On invitation of Kunsthaus NRW, Krista Jantowski (artistic researcher at the Reading Room / Greylight Projects) initiated Meeting You In The Margins, a carefully curated selection of books that approach environmental destruction, processes of extraction, and histories of empire, as both material realities as well as a cultural logic. Thinking from different localities and disciplines, the authors of the books question how we have come to see the world, by interrogating the interplay between histories of extractivism, the knowledge it has produced (as well as obscured) and our cultural imaginings. This collection is on display and open to read at the library of Kunsthaus NRW, as we invite readers to reflect on art’s role in shaping what we talk about when we talk about “nature”, “environment” or “crisis” by using the margins of the books as a space for thinking, responding and meeting other readers.


As a visual interlude to this project, she has invited visual artist Rachel Bacon to participate in What The Flag?!. Her practice explores an expanded understanding of drawing within larger issues concerning landscape, geology, extraction industries and the aesthetics of the climate emergency. Site visits to open-pit mining areas and research into the effects of climate warming form the starting point for painstaking, semi-sculptural drawings often made on crumpled paper with graphite.

Apparatus 22, “Everything at a distance becomes abstraction”, 2024

From: Ludwig Forum museum (DE)
To: Greylight Projects (NL)

With so many man-made catastrophes befalling and wars raging (close and afar), instantly shared in countless images and videos, a modern-day wanderer finds itself powerlessly contemplating not the sublime, but the horrors of human nature and the eerie landscapes of injustice. Mutating a famed Novalis musing “Everything at a distance turns into / becomes poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events” and Caspar DavidFriedrich references, the title and aesthetic exploration of the Apparatus 22 flag open a reflection on feeling powerless and on coping mechanisms in dealing with images of war, loss and traumatic experiences.


Apparatus 22 is a collective of daydreamers, citizens of many realms, researchers, poetic activists and (failed) futurologists founded in January 2011 by current members Erika Olea, Maria Farcas, Dragos Olea together with Ioana Nemes (1979 – 2011) in Bucharest, Romania. Beginning with 2015 they are working between Bucharest, Brussels and SUPRAINFINIT utopian universe. In their very diverse works – installations, performances, text based-shapes, reality is mixed with fiction and storytelling and all merge with a critical approach drawing knowledge & experiences in design, sociology, literature and economics.

Eloïse Lega, “En voie de disparition”, 2019 – 2023

From: La Châtaigneraie, Flémalle (BE)
To: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)

Eloïse Lega is a multidisciplinary artist who combines traditional techniques like engraving, photography, drawing, etc. with digital techniques like video, electronics, laser engraving, in her installations. Her concerns revolve around the themes of disappearance, the passage of time and the fragility of life.


Where am I standing? in the face of inevitable time? En voie de disparition (Endangered) is based on a photograph from her first solo exhibition Absences at the Botanique in Brussels. Photographs are traces that accompany memories. Once taken out of their private setting and sold in flea markets, they lose their sentimental value in favor of financial value. Once anonymity appears, a second death occurs when no words can any longer animate the image. This is how in his work, certain recovered images are altered. In this case, bad weather, revealing the decline of this memory, this ongoing forgetting and this persisting presence despite everything.

Yann Freichels, “Trotz alledem!”, 2024

From: IKOB museum, Eupen (BE)
To: Ludwig Forum, Aachen (DE)

The flag by Yann Freichels is a drawing entitled Trotz Alledem [In spite of it all]. It is based on a photograph of Karl Liebknecht, a prominent German socialist and anti-militarist, taken after his assassination. The flag in the drawing transitions from dark (almost black) at the top to light at the bottom, resembling a washed-out mourning flag—a visual metaphor for the fading hopes and the heavy mourning that followed the violent suppression of the German Revolution in 1919. Rosa Luxemburg, a comrade of Liebknecht’s, ended her final text with the words “I was, I am, I will be,” a testament to her enduring spirit and commitment to revolutionary ideals. Karl Liebknecht began his with Trotz Alledem, underscoring his defiance in the face of imminent death. For Freichels, the work asks: Where am I—in which version of my present? A double longing that drowns out the clamor of revolt and war. Something that nullifies the truth of the present.


Yann Freichels (*1996) lives and works in Grüfflingen, Belgium. He completed his training in painting at the École Supérieure des Arts de la Ville de Liège (ESAVL) in 2020. His works have been presented in solo exhibitions at LLS Paleis in Antwerpen, Belgium; Espace 251 Nord in Liège, Belgium; Saarländische Galerie in Berlin, Germany; and IKOB in Eupen, Belgium. His group exhibitions include New Horizons in Painting at ISELP, Brussels, Belgium; Boum, Boum, Bang at Abattoirs de Bomel, Namur, Belgium; and Private Views, curated by Yves Randaxhe at La Boverie, Liège, Belgium.

Dorothy Hendriks, “DOROTHYMANIA”, 2024

From: IKOB museum, Eupen (BE)
To: Ludwig Forum, Aachen (DE)

Dorothy is in here, in dorothymania, her own abundance of queer identity making up for her own lost history through sheer quantity in images appropriated from her surroundings and interests. then chewed on and regurgitated onto paper and then collaged into the image of a flag.


Dorothy (a.k.a. dorothyinhell) Hendriks is a transwoman and multi-disciplinary artist. She keeps herself busy exploring the creation of her own world through marker paintings, sculptures, video, sound or whatever new thing she decides interests her this week. She is an extraterrestrial sponge, absorbing her surroundings and appropriating it into her own language and style. her art is interested in topics around the horror of having a body and the relation to gender and the way institutions have been a frustration on her life as woman and artist. She is in hell, and heaven is a personal ascension reached through creation.

Thomas Weidenhaupt, “Balbina”, 2021

From: NAK / Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (DE)
To: La Châtaigneraie, Flémalle (BE)

Taking the topic of Where am I standing? for this year’s What the Flag?! project quite literally, photographer Thomas Weidenhaupt depicts pop singer Balbina standing on a normally busy road. In a bright orange tunnel close to ICC Berlin, the singer is finding herself staged and clothed for the occasion of taking press pictures and posing accordingly while doing so. By coincidence a dead bird, lying crushed on the street, sneaks its way into the picture as well, challenging the idea of this being merely a glamorous photo shoot. A second layer to this picture is the stand Balbina is actually taking in real life – supporting women’s rights in the music business as well as fighting the injustice of payments from streaming services. For taking this picture Weidenhaupt was nominated for the first Abbey Road Music Photography Awards in London in 2022.Thomas Weidenhaupt (*1983 in Eschweiler, Germany) is a self-taught photographer, mostly occupied with architectural and portrait photography. Mainly using analogue 35mm and medium format and instant cameras, he exhibited nationally and his photos were featured in European Photography, Headmaster Magazine, Numéro Berlin, Kaput Magazin, Vogue.de, Kim Gordon: No Icon, Electronic Sound Magazine, Handelsblatt, Boston Review and ARTMAPP. Weidenhaupt currently lives nearby Aachen.