• June Yap is curator of No Country and the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia

• Zoe Butt is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City 

The title of No Country draws from the opening line of a poem by William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928), which was adapted into a contemporary thriller by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005), and film by the Coen Brothers (2007). No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia appropriates historical, geographic and intertextual traversal of Irish poem, American novel and film to an exhibition on Asia, and in so doing references the traces and overlaps in the exchanges and adaptations that are characteristic of the histories and cultures of the South and Southeast Asia. While appearing at first to negate the concept of nation, No Country is finally an exploration of its problematic cartography. In this talk, No Country curator June Yap and Zoe Butt from Sàn Art explore curatorial strategies in negotiating mappings and representations of Asia today.