How does a nation come into being?

Art Space Border opened with Your Free Nation, an exhibition by Yoyojin examining the nation as a structure formed through historical and political conditions. The exhibition brought questions of collective identity, technology and individual agency into the space.

Drawing on Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities, it approached a nation as a shared imagination organised through narratives, media and relations of power. If nations are produced through these processes, could artificial intelligence become another medium through which they are generated?

Visitors were invited to take part in creating their own nations. This shifted attention from the nation as a distant, overwhelming system to the feelings and choices through which individuals imagine belonging. It also asked what political and ethical choices remain when a country once regarded as one's own no longer feels that way.

Within this inquiry, nations appear as unstable structures that are continually made, challenged and remade. Peace, too, is considered through changing conditions and relations of power. The exhibition offered a space to reconsider the connections between nations, technology and the individual.