Peter Friedl's projects place aesthetic questions within an expanded field that takes into account the social, political and philosophical context. This textile piece quotes and diverts a flag with a red background and the central star of the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (ERNK, a military organization linked to PKK, founded in 1985 and disbanded in 2000), and not the national flag of Kurdistan. The artist became interested as from 1994, when the town of Lice was destroyed by the Turkish army and the PKK was expelled from Germany. This flag got a lot of visibility in the media at the time.
The artist has lightened the red and emptied the central circle to question the role of the emblem as a representative sign for a group. Lightening and cutting out are ways of reclaiming all the complexities. New Kurdish Flag 01 considers the status of the flag as an object of propaganda which was activated in the streets during different performances, before being 'museified' and placed in a frame in 2005, in a semantic slip. The fabric acquires a political dimension. Is it still possible to reactivate it in the real world?