The Nation // Live is the culmination of the first major community outreach project for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery since its spectacular three-year refurbishment was completed in 2011. Arranged across five themes - Work, Union, Faith, Civil War and Roots - the exhibition links local heroes, characters and events to the Portrait Gallery collection, and features a range of media including video, music, performance and sculpture.

The themes explore crucial turning points in Scotland's history and are linked to appropriate regional settings. Encounters between past and present, national and local, have been explored in creative collaborations between artists and communities in Skye, Inverness, Dumfries, Clydebank and other areas in the central belt. The resulting artworks display how contemporary Scots think and feel about their past, present and future.

The projects, which have been organised by the National Galleries of Scotland Education Department, are unified in a contemporary video artwork by the filmmaker Daniel Warren which forms the centre-piece of the exhibition. Included in the video is footage from Clydebank documenting a community-wide, cross-generational discussion, which formed the basis for a voice drama created by writer Martin O'Connor to address the life and legacy of the late trade-union campaigner Jimmy Reid. Also featured is SkyeDance, a group of young dancers from Skye who choreographed their own personal conceptions of faith at sites on the island associated with the Christian mission of Saint Columba.

Music forms a core part of the exhibition through the work of celebrated Scottish folk/electronic musician Drew Wright (aka Wounded Knee) who has created a powerful set of songs fusing Scotland's folk music heritage and traditional styles from around the world. Wright worked alongside recent migrants to Scotland to create and perform a collection of songs which reflect the experiences of people who have left their homelands to make new lives in this country. The songs are being released on a vinyl LP and a live performance will mark the opening of the exhibition.

Events from the late seventeenth century are explored through a film and photographs created by a group of Dumfriesshire teenagers in response to the bloody 'Killing Times' of the Covenanting era. Moving forward in time, the legacy of the 1707 Act of Union is represented by a display of large bronze medals newly forged by contemporary highlanders, including soldiers and students, as representations of their present-day identities.

Commenting on the exhibition, Senior Outreach Officer for the National Galleries of Scotland, Robin Baillie said, 'The Nation//Live offered ordinary Scots the opportunity to create a "living history", to assess how the past has made them what they are and to address how this might shape their future. We looked at five moments that made the nation and asked: where has this legacy left Scotland today? We hope we have given a platform to those communities and individuals who don’t normally get to shape the national debate.'