Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories at Hamburger Bahnhof addresses art’s relationship to political protest, historical trauma and social narratives from the 19th century to the present. At a time when icebergs are melting faster than societies are reacting to this new reality, and the end of the world is more conceivable than the end of capitalism, the exhibition considers the climate and environment not only from an ecological standpoint but also from a social one.

In this context, Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories poses questions about the often brutal processes of nation-building, the role assigned to art in that process, and which hegemonic as well as alternative forms of community and accompanying narratives are conceivable and reflected in artworks. Based on Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, the exhibition reflects on the significance of “nation” contained in the name “National Gallery”, along with other concepts of connectedness, solidarity and individuality.

An International Collaborative Project with Works by over Fifty Artists

Works by more than fifty artists are on display, including Amanda Heng, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Arahmaiani, Ho Tzu Nyen, Käthe Kollwitz, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Marina Abramovic, Melati Suryodarmo, Tita Salina, Willem de Rooij and many others. An ongoing international collaborative project, the exhibition brings together for the first time artworks from the collections of the National Gallery of Indonesia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum and the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories is a research dialogue initiated by the Goethe-Institut in 2017 and funded by it to date, between the participating curators and their selected collections at the National Gallery of Indonesia, the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Singapore Art Museum. In the spirit of the shared collection, the exchange between the participating curators and institutions will continue in the future. The exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof is accompanied by the Cluster of Excellence 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.

The exhibitions at the participating institutions are curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Grace Samboh, Gridthiya Gaweewong and June Yap.

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in dialogue with the collections of National Gallery of Indonesia (Jakarta, Indonesia), MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai, Thailand), Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), initiated by the Goethe-Institut Südostasien, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) and the Goethe-Institut