As America marks its 250th birthday, Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present We Had Been Citizens of No Country, featuring works by john gerrard and Anna Barlik, both of whom take the national flag as their primary source material. A flag compresses a whole political order into a two-dimensional symbol which tells you where one country ends and another begins, who belongs and who doesn’t, and asks to be read as natural, permanent, given. john gerrard and Barlik deconstruct that symbol, each working from opposite ends of the material spectrum; one dissolves the flag into code and smoke, the other presses it into steel, tulle, and cloth. Through flags, john gerrard projects existing nations into a bleak and unequal future whereas Barlik suggests nations that never existed, challenging the fixed ideas and identities these visual codes are built to enforce. The overriding question asked here at the boundary of dystopia and utopia is whether belonging is derived from borders and history, or from the values, culture, and experience we actually share.
john gerrard builds real-time generative simulations: code-driven worlds that run continuously and respond to the viewer’s own spatial and solar environments wherever they may be. In World Flag, 195 national flags appear as coloured virtual smoke, each planted in a fictitious future desert. Dawn breaks and night falls for each locale across the day and the year. The works are generated from a single script stored on-chain and rendered directly in the browser, so the viewer can click-and-drag to look around each scene. The release order of each originally followed a greenhouse gas emissions index, from the highest-emitting country to the lowest. In john gerrard’s hands the flag becomes a militaristic sign for a doomed place-based order, the state reduced to an apparition of itself, the map redrawn by environmental failure rather than by borders.
Where john gerrard‘s flags exist only as simulation, Barlik’s are physical, tangible objects forged from metal, softness cast in steel. Her series Flags of Non-Existent Countries reassigns the colours, shapes, and surfaces of national flags to make emblems for countries that never existed. National colour codes are softened and reordered; the flat colour plane becomes sculptural, curving like cloth in wind or turning to show its back. Barlik treats identity as something assembled and reassembled rather than fixed, built as much through shared values and culture as through borders and history.
Together, john gerrard and Barlik approach the flag as something constructed rather than natural. john gerrard exposes the systems behind it, the data, history, and climate crises that quietly decide a nation’s fate, while Barlik exposes the construction itself, the compositional arbitrariness, and, through physical materials, the seams and supports a finished flag is meant to obscure. At a moment of sharpening nationalism and tightening borders, both loosen the symbol’s grip and ask what belonging is actually built from.
About the artists:
john gerrard (born 1974, Ireland) is an artist known for his virtual sculptures, which take the form of digital simulations made using real-time computer graphics. His work has been exhibited at institutions including LACMA, Los Angeles; Tate Britain, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. john gerrard has also participated in several biennials including the 11th Shanghai Biennale, 53rd Venice Biennale and Manifesta 12, Palermo.
Anna Barlik (b. 1985, Poland) is an artist whose multidisciplinary sculptural practice investigates identity, systems of representation and the politics of form. She represented Poland in the Polish Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2023). Recent residencies include Art Omi (New York, 2025) and KODA House on Governors Island (New York, 2026), where she developed and presented Flags of Non-Existent Countries, the body of work featured in this exhibition.
