How To Not Build A Nation: Performative Symposium on 12 June 2022

Exhibition view „Nation, Narration, Narcosis. Collecting Entanglements and Embodied
Histories“, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2021. Foreground: The Forst
Curriculum, How Not To Build A Nation, 2021. Background: Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure,
1974 — Exhibition view „Nation, Narration, Narcosis. Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories“, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2021. Foreground: The Forst Curriculum, How Not To Build A Nation, 2021. Background: Bruce Nauman © the artists © Bruce Nauman / Vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns

How To Not Build A Nation: Performative Symposium at Hamburger Bahnhof on 12 June 2022

08.06.2022
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

On 12 June 2022 a performative symposium activates the installation How To Not Build A Nation in the exhibition Nation, Narration, Narcosis at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. The installation formulates modes of resistance against the nationalist formation of states and explores the role of the nation, particularly in the context of Zomia.

Zomia is a geographical term for a nearly 2.5 million square kilometre area of mainland in Southeast Asia that stretches from the north-east of India eastwards through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, the central highlands of Vietnam to Cambodia, encompassing the southern Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and western Guangxi. The political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott calls it the largest remaining non-state space in the world, because the roughly 100 million people who live there do not belong to any government.

Detailed information: Learn more about the event

The program is developed with the support of the Goethe-Institut in the framework of Collecting Entanglement and Embodied Histories, a dialogue between the collections of Nationalgalerie, Galeri Nasional Indonesia, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, and Singapore Art Museum, initiated by the Goethe-Institut.