Hello Artwork, What is Your Nationality?

The multiauthor book »Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State. Case Studies from a Global Context« examines the contradictions and tensions that arise when contemporary demands for transculturality and decoloniality meet the institutions of the nation-state. Although museums are an invention of modern nation-states, their role seems to fade into the background at moments of transculturality. The Museum Global program of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), for instance, has contributed to the dismantling of the dominance of particular national narratives. The goal of the program was »to make visible the global networks of relations between people, artistic currents, and objects that have been largely neglected in the common narrative of modernity.« Hamburger Bahnhof took part in this initiative spearheaded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes with the exhibition Hello World. Revisions of a Collection, in 2018. The current exhibition, Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories, develops these ideas further, interrogating the often-brutal processes of nation-building, the role assigned to art in this process, and what both hegemonic and alternative forms of community—and their narratives—are conceivable and reflected in works of art.

Narratives of transculturality and their material conditions often diverge. With case studies from different geo- and sociopolitical contexts around the world, Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State interrogates the role of the nation-state in museums, collections, and cultural heritage. The contributors reveal the ways in which nation-states still determine practices of collection and circulation and, with them, contemporary narratives, even affecting the form and presentation of the artifacts themselves. They also investigate exhibition practices and museum approaches that take transcultural interconnectedness in immigrant societies seriously.

The book includes contributions by Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Natasha Ginwala, Monica Hanna, Rajkamal Kahlon, Suzana Milevska, Mirjam Shatanawi, Kavita Singh, Ruth Stamm, and Andrea Witcomb.

The event »Hello artwork, what is your nationality?« extended the discussion found in the volume »Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State« to artists from the exhibition Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories, as well as to other guests who address the question of the material conditions of actual transculturality.

The book »Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation State« is edited by Susanne Leeb and MoA member Nina Samuel and was published by transcript Verlag as part of the series »Edition Museum« in March 2022 (ISBN: 978-3-8394-5514-2).

The event was organized by Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin, in collaboration with the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Leuphana University Lüneburg.