Hammad Nasar: Curating Nation - Exhibitions as Infrastructures of Difference and Belonging

Join us for the next event in the NYUAD Art Gallery series CURATORS TALK.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play, Hammad Nasar’s project for the UAE’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017), explored play as a framework for embodied practices of belonging. In this presentation, he considers Rock, Paper, Scissors within a larger trajectory of exhibition-led inquiry in different geographies and contexts; from the nation-birthing capacities of partitions (Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, 2005–14) to the quinquennial survey of post-Brexit Britain (British Art Show 9, 2021–23) and the cultural entanglements of empire (Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now and Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends, both 2023-24). He argues for the exhibition as a basecamp — shared archives of forms, knowledges, and relations — with the capacity to fuel new journeys.