Works by Navine

The Islamic State appropriated the Black Banner, a flag associated for 1200 years with Sunni Islam, and converted it to an irritatingly basic flag, simply the word Allah in white on black, as though this fundamentalist aesthetics could suck legitimacy away from other Sunni powers. In her series The Black Standard (2016), Navine G. Khan-Dossos (UK, Greece) re-appropriates the ISIS flag, making it the lightly encrypted basis of works that draw on its composition, use of black and white, and historical associations. Wittily, Khan-Dossos redeploys the flag as a calibration target for each painting, reducing the fearsome symbol to a tool for establishing the standard of black and white values.