One happening from Lantian Xie’s A Rumble Interrupted Our Chat
Commissioned for Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Courtesy National Pavilion UAE La Biennale di Venezia
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.
About the speaker
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer, and strategist based in London. He co-founded the pioneering London art space, Green Cardamom; was Head of Research and Programs at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London. He has held senior research fellowships at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute and Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where he co-led the ‘London, Asia’ project. He advises numerous arts organizations and is a Board Member of the Henry Moore Foundation, UK, and Mophradat, Belgium, and a Council Member of Asia Forum.
