Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

Dit Land Eksisterer Ikke – Gør Det Selv (Your Country Doesn’t Exist – Do It Your Self) is a new iteration of the ongoing project Your country doesn’t exist in which we collaborate with the icelandic ambassador to Denmark, Sturla Sigurjónsson. We asked the ambassador to paint in black and white the ‘do it yourself’ painting in Danish Dit land eksisterer ikke (Your country doesn’t exist). He accepted the collaboration but by not filling in all the letters of the drawing, leaving unpainted “ikke” (“not”) and filling in the rest of the sentence. Earlier the same year we collaborated with Gunnar Snorri Gunnarsson, Icelandic ambassador to Germany on the first painting of this series in English.

Your Country Doesn’t Exist is an ongoing campaign from Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, which started in 2003 in Istanbul, the beginning of which year was marked by global anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies. Since then, the project developed to include different forms and formats and it travels the world spreading the sentence, “Your country doesn’t exist” in different languages and through various visual modes, including billboards, TV advertisements, post-stamps, wall-drawings, and neon signs among other.

Presented in the exhibition Terms of Belonging, curated by Johan Lundh and Aileen Burns at Overgaden, Copenhagen.