Ni Haifeng's flag Bare Life - 1995. The original installation, In the Labyrinth of Freedom (2021), comprises 268 flags, each carrying words, phrases, or texts representing discourses on freedom from different historical periods.
The flag presented here quotes the expression "bare life", introduced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In it, Agamben examines the condition of human beings stripped of political and legal recognition. His analysis studies pure human suffering, the naked life in concentration camps, the human condition in its most perverse manifestation. What defines "bare life", he says, is not simply suffering, but the condition in which a political and legal system places a person outside its normal protections, leaving their life vulnerable to control or even destruction without the usual legal consequences.
The work touches on a painfully contemporary situation that we continue to witness in various parts of the world, while standing also as a provocative reminder of what could happen when a complex human condition is reduced to just two words.