Folding Nations

 

Solo exhibition

Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station

19.03.2026-20.04.26

 

In Anne Langgaard’s total installation Folding Nations, the paper airplane is transformed into a charged symbol of national identity, geopolitics, and a vulnerable world order.

 

The installation consists of 254 hand-folded airplanes in A4 size, made in paper-thin porcelain and painted with the national flags of all recognized states and dependent territories listed in ISO 3166-1. Each airplane represents a nation, but together they form a fragmented landscape where order and structure are replaced by chaos and weight. A quiet monument to the condition of nations—their gravity, their unrest, their transformation.

 

Folding Nations operates within a field of tension between the poetic and the political, between the intimate and the global. It allows the paper airplane to carry a heavy narrative about identity, territory, and the global instability we encounter in everyday life. Where we usually associate the airplane with movement and freedom, these are bound to the ground, weighed down by their own materiality, in a world that has lost its lightness. National identity, belonging, and sovereignty do not appear here as fixed entities, but as part of a complex and often conflict-ridden reality, where the nation-state can function both as a framework for community and as a source of exclusion.

 

In the exhibition space, graphic copper plates are also presented, where borders from wars and conflicts are incised and etched as overlapping traces, displacements, and ruptures. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 61 state-based conflicts and 11 wars were recorded in 2024, where disputes over national borders were a direct cause. These borders form a concrete backdrop for the works, and the oxidized copper plates continue to change over time. While the porcelain airplanes are frozen in their fragile form, the copper is in slow motion. Borders appear here as negotiated, unstable, and continuously dissolving.

 

Folding Nations is an invitation to reflect. A reminder that what we believed to be solid can crumble, and that the fragile is often what carries the greatest weight.

 

All Photoes: Sofus Graau