I don’t trust you anymore, Flag #59, 2019
Among the many thought-provoking works featured in the exhibition For Which It Stands… at the Fairfield University Art Museum is Sarah Rahbar’s I don’t trust you anymore, Flag #59 (2019), a mixed-media American flag assemblage that confronts themes of patriotism, identity, conflict, and disillusionment. The following wall label by Silvia Marsans-Sakly, PhD offers further insight into Rahbar’s powerful work and its place within the exhibition’s broader exploration of the American flag as a complex and evolving symbol.
By: Silvia Marsans-Sakly, PhD Associate Professor of the Practice of History and Islamic World
I don’t trust you anymore, Flag #59, 2019 Mixed media, collected vintage objects, on vintage US flag Courtesy of Sara Rahbar
Sara Rahbar (American, born Iran, 1976)
This work forms part of a series that the artist began in the years following 9/11, using the American flag as a canvas. Rahbar, who emigrated from Iran to the United States during the Islamic Revolution and overthrow of the Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, when she was a 4-year-old, stitches together a disparate range of materials as she wrestles with patriotism, politics, and her own biography.
In this reimagined American flag, the artist—who emigrated to the United States after a conflict the U.S. helped ignite to destabilize both countries and weaken the region—keeps the familiar constellation of stars but forges the stripes from cartridge and utility belts, dog tags, hammered Middle Eastern charms, and crucifixes. The result lays bare a nation whose symbolic fabric has been rewoven through the gear of killing. The outline remains, but its promise hardens into iron: a banner of democratic ideals set against the reality of a nation for whom war is not an aberration but a defining identity—and a profitable industry. These weapon-laden stripes expose the gulf between the justifications offered at home—“defense,” “freedom,” “security”—and the power projected abroad through endless war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and beyond. In this flag, the myth of democratic virtue stands next to the machinery that sustains empire.
Image: Sara Rahbar, I don’t trust you anymore, Flag #59, 2019, mixed media, collected vintage objects, on vintage US flag. Courtesy of the artist. © Sara Rahbar