The national is relational—the extraneous condition of the national defines postcolonial art practice and curation, internalizing a state of estrangement. This paper highlights art positions engaging global art economies yet claiming neither an independence from the market nor geopolitical or personal neutrality. Instead, these practices attempt to expose, evade, and subvert the power of the nation state in the art world. Resistance towards the state is being methodically erased by the global art market mechanisms—for instance, Iranian citizens are well represented on the international exhibition and fair circuit, where their representation of the state is mute; nevertheless, financial sanctions on trade with Iran affect artists, dealers, and collectors in the same way as they affect other trades. An ongoing curatorial initiative OtherIS (www.otheris.com) interrogates art production and exchange with the sanctioned countries—rather than gloss over the existing sociopolitical condition via unsignified inclusion, its projects highlight the position of exclusion and clandestine economies that ensue. On the other hand, global mutual investment trust models, such as MutualArt and its affiliate the Artists Pension Trust (APT), apply technological innovations in statistics and financial risk management concepts to art as another asset, its systems ostensibly disengaged from the national economic and ideological interests. Yet as artist Walid Raad has demonstrated in his investigative tableau on the APT as part of his series Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, affects of the national attend to the transactions concerning art. The two case studies exemplify the potential of art agency to undercut signifiers of both the national and the global as they focus on the extra-national interstices of art production and distribution. Circumvention of the national calls for a relational estrangement—its theorization will be sought in Henri Lefebvre’s critique of the Marxist notion of alienation “as this single yet dual movement of objectification and externalization—of realization and derealization.” The nationalized object can be successfully realized in the global art marketplace; whereas the national that is externalized, or alienated, is not as easily commodified—this condition of alienation providing a liminal space for a critique.