Flag Series: Elektra KB, Bandera sin miedo, 2024

Americas Society’s Flag Series is pleased to present Elektra KB's Bandera sin miedo, 2024. 

Bandera sin miedo aims to instill a triumphant and healing spirit within New York City’s urban landscape, while symbolizing resilience and the relentless pursuit of bodily autonomy. 

The flag depicts a healer-warrior engulfed in flames, while clutching the key to liberation in one hand and gesturing towards the future with the other. Drawing from personal struggle, Latin American folklore, and utopian exploration, the artist envisioned an alternative universe called "The Cathara Autonomous Territory," symbolized by a mystical healer traveling through time and space in response to our collective call for liberation. 

The project, spanning a year of meticulous craftsmanship, is a labor of love informed by the artist's experience as an immigrant living in New York, a survivor of reproductive rights criminalization and a traumatic apartment fire. 

The Flag Series presents public artworks on 68th Street, furthering Americas Society’s engagement with the surrounding community in New York and creating new dialogues between artists of the Americas and our audiences. Bandera sin miedo will be on view from June 5 to September 3, 2024. 

About the artist:

Elektra KB is a Latin American futurist artist based in Brooklyn, NY. They grew up in a hospital in a rural area in Colombia where their parents were doctors. They work in a speculative feminist practice engaging with body politics, including alternative worlds and mythology, with textiles, video, installation, and technology. In utopias and dystopias, discovered, invented, or documentarian. Inviting Luddism and play. Sometimes, with a therapeutic aim of transforming spaces of trauma, including reworked protest signs and architectural or everyday objects. Formally, they draw inspiration from Latin American folklore, mythology and eastern European Avant-Garde, looking at history through the eyes of their own mixed heritage. 

They address the body through a crip lens using a decolonial purpose. Engaging with themes of power dynamics from a global south consciousness, the ‘post nuclear family’, migrations, and healing rituals. Their work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, The Moma Warsaw, the Madre Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. Their work is held in the public collections of the Yinchuan Moca, Salomon Foundation, and Moma Warsaw. Their work has been reviewed in: Artforum, Artnews, Artsy, Bomb, Guardian, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times.