Waving the Future (2021) is a flag that Noor Nuyten designed in collaboration with her friend and artist Sjoerd van Leeuwen. Both concerned about climate change, resulting in an uncertain future, they made an adjustment to the Dutch national flag. Where global warming used to be a relatively invisible threat, in recent years it has become an undeniable fact resulting in natural disasters, such as the floods in The Netherlands, Germany and Belgium this summer, but also other natural disasters like the wildfires in countries such as Australia and Greece.
Where the sea was for Nuyten always a poetic phenomenon (the motifs of the sea and waves appear in her work quite frequently), it has slowly become something unpredictable and threatening. During the exhibition Reading a Wave the flag waves on the facade of Upstream Gallery, as a reminder of the danger the Netherlands faces when we don’t act up. Just like the rest of Nuyten’s works in the exhibition, the flag is made out of recycled / recyclable materials, in this case recycled PET bottles.