24 Flaggen – Iman Issa

With the project 24 Flags, Kunstmeile Hamburg brings art into the public realm. Following its first edition last summer, the series returns with a second edition along the 24 flagpoles located around Glockengießerwall and Klosterwall. Flags are familiar features of the urban landscape, serving both as markers of orientation and as vehicles for images. Embedded within the visual fabric of the city, they appear here as artistic interventions. For this second edition, Chloë Bass, Iman Issa and Nathalie Du Pasquier have each developed site-specific works. What unites them is an interest in how meaning emerges through the interplay of context, arrangement and perception. Chloë Bass explores how intimate experiences are renegotiated within public and urban settings. Iman Issa brings together historical references, text and objects in new constellations, reflecting on the ways meaning is shaped through display and interpretation. Nathalie Du Pasquier works across painting, objects and installation, combining representational and abstract elements in dynamic spatial arrangements. At the heart of Iman Issa’s artistic practice lies the question of how meaning arises and is conveyed. Through sculpture, photography, text, video and sound, she develops ‘displays’ – arrangements in which objects, images and texts converge at the intersections of perception, memory and institutional context. Meaning does not appear here as a fixed property of things, but as the result of the relationships between their elements and the viewers’ perception. "Brief a den, der hinschaut (Germany 2026)" extends these questions into the public space. Spread across the urban landscape, the work consists of 24 flags that combine Arabic words, blocks of colour, numbers, shapes, symbols and fragments of images to form independent compositions. Rather than dictating a single interpretation, the work invites viewers to derive meaning from the relationships between the individual elements and their own perception.