The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) may be a small strip of land, but it is one of the most dramatic spaces on earth, simultaneously standing for the devastating traumas of war and an activist movement for peace and environmentalism. Using the 2010 DMZ Special Exhibition at the Korean War Memorial in Seoul as a case study, this essay examines South Korea's strategic staging of discursive memories of the Korean War in a museum space, where certain performative conditions illuminate the immanent absurdities of the Korean partition. The central questions concern the curatorial design of the exhibition, especially the ways by which spectators are conditioned, both ideologically and kinesthetically, to recall events in history that few of the exhibition visitors experienced firsthand. What happens when the exhibition's mise en scène controls spectators' experiences of recent Korean history— namely, the partition of Korea and the subsequent creation of the DMZ— so completely that it potentially alters their perceptions of the historic past and hopes for the future? More broadly, the essay asks how the performative embodiment of memory, often aided by new technologies of seeing, might shift the chronological orientation of museum and memorial spaces. Finally, the essay asks whether museums and memorials that commemorate past events should also speculate on the future.