Anna Barlik: Flags of Non-Existent Countries

Anna Barlik, Flags of Non-Existent Countries  (sketches), 2026.

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KODA, New York, presents the solo exhibition of Anna Barlik: Flags of Non-Existent Countries on view May 23-July 5, 2026 at KODA House 407b on Governors Island, New York. The artist’s new series lending title to the exhibition is a series of formal compositions that engage the visual codes of nationality while critically reinterpreting them. The starting point is the flag, as one of the most recognizable symbols of unity, identity and political belonging. In Barlik’s work, such order becomes destabilized — colors that are assigned to certain countries or places become re-ordered, deconstructured, and reconfigured, creating visual marks, or speculative emblems, for countries that have never existed. In these works, these colors are changed into softer and different - less obvious tones. By moving away from their usual forms, the works ask how symbols gain meaning and power, and encourage viewers to look again at ideas often seen as fixed or natural.

 

Barlik is interested in the utopian potential of this gesture. What happens when we strip a symbol of its official meaning? Is nationality a permanent category or is it a construct that is subject to constant negotiation? Does a sense of belonging emerge exclusively from borders and history or is it built primarily through common values, culture, and experiences we share?

 

It is exactly the common values and culture that often shape us more strongly than formal political divides. They are the ones creating connections, building communities, and influencing the way we understand ourselves and each other. For the artist, identity is not a solid state. We define ourselves, re-define ourselves, construct and deconstruct ourselves in an ongoing process. Similarly to flags in this series, our belonging is fluid, changeable, and multi-layered.

 

When entering KODA House, a tulle flag welcomes visitors, referencing the visual language of national display and civic ritual. Throughout the exhibition, the presented works form a series of sketches and case studies exploring flags, systems of belonging, and the symbolic role of color. The sunroom becomes an installation space with a linear drawing in space. In the main gallery, steel flag-like sculptures are prominently installed, including above the fireplace and in the stairway entrance. Constructed from separate elements and partially disassembled, they appear as if caught in a moment of transformation. Paper sketches and compositions appear across the space, emphasizing process and materiality. In the kitchen gallery, flags rendered as everyday kitchen cloths are present, extending the exhibition’s vocabulary into the realm of the domestic and the functional.

 

Artworks presented at KODA are presented in dialogue with earlier projects such as DATAMENT, a site-specific installation that represented Poland in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennial (2023). DATAMENT explores how architecture is more and more shaped by data and algorithms. It questions our trust in systems that promise clear answers, while often creating distorted or incomplete images of reality. Also, Obstacles, a series of sculptures addressing adversity and the human ability to confront it, is presented alongside Flags of Non-Existent Countries. All these projects, despite formal differences, are connected by an interest in the relation between an individual and a system — between what is given and what is possible to transform.

 

Anna Barlik is an artist-in-residence at KODA in 2026 in the season entitled Utopia. In this context, she wishes to show that even the simplest visual means can carry enormous emotional and conceptual weight. Geometric layout, color, rhythm, or composition, are not neutral forms — they become carriers of memory, tensions, aspirations, and questions about the future. This exhibition is an invitation to think about the world not as a closed map of fixed borders but as a space open to continuous reimagination.

 

The exhibition Anna Barlik: Flags of Non-Existent Countries is curated by Klaudia Ofwona Draber with curatorial assistance from Elif Usuloglu. Artist Talk, with Anna Barlik and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Curatorial Associate at MoMA, will take place on Saturday, June 20, 2026 at 3-5pm at KODA House (407b on Governors Island, New York) — this event is presented in collaboration with Izabela Gola, Polish Cultural Institute New York. Anna Barlik’s participation in KODA’s Artist Residency program is financed, in part, by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Republic of Poland, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

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Artist Bio

In 2004, Anna Barlik began her art studies at the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, majoring in jewelry design and graduating cum laude three years later. Simultaneously, she pursued studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 2005 to 2010. During her time at the Faculty of Sculpture, Anna received a scholarship to Universität der Künste in Berlin, which she attended in 2008. After graduating in 2010, she continued her education by undertaking a Ph.D. at her Warsaw alma mater while also completing a postgraduate program in urban planning at the Architecture and Urban Planning Department of Warsaw Technical University. In 2017, she successfully defended her Ph.D. in art, culminating a four-year research project focused on spatial concepts in Nordic culture. In 2025, she obtained her habilitation degree in the arts, and was subsequently awarded the title of Professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (PJATK), where she remains an active member of the academic community, teaching composition and sculpture.