For our Economy and Culture

In his essay written for Jasmina Cibic’s solo presentation For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale, Tevž Logar frames the project as a complex, immersive installation that interrogates the relationship between art, architecture, and ideology. Cibic constructs “total works of art” that operate within and expose systems of power, revealing how cultural production is shaped by political structures and strategies of representation.

The project focuses on the mechanisms through which national identity is constructed and displayed. Through architectural interventions, film, and recontextualised artworks, Cibic transforms the Slovenian Pavilion into a staged environment that blurs the boundaries between public and private space, directing the viewer’s gaze and implicating them within systems of observation and control.

Key elements—including wallpaper depicting the ideologically charged beetle Anophthalmus hitleri, still-life paintings from the Slovenian parliament, and films based on archival political debates—highlight how aesthetic choices are never neutral but deeply entangled with ideological agendas. By reconstructing these historical and symbolic frameworks, the work exposes the processes through which nations select, frame, and legitimise cultural icons.

The project reveals art as part of the state’s ideological apparatus while simultaneously opening a space for critical reflection. It invites viewers to question how meaning is produced and to locate their own position within the structures that shape perception, suggesting both the inescapability of ideology and the possibility of its interrogation.

A 2013 Art Tribune interview with Jasmina Cibic, discussing For Our Economy and Culture at the Slovenian Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennial as a critical investigation into how culture operates as soft power, where architecture, narrative, and historical reenactment reveal the mechanisms through which nations construct and project identity.

Ruby Beesley reads Jasmina Cibic’s work through the framework of the Venice Biennale, where national representation is both performed and scrutinised. Rather than attempting to sidestep this role, Cibic embraces its conditions, using the Pavilion itself as a site of inquiry into how states construct and circulate their image.

At the centre of Beesley’s analysis is For our Economy and Culture, where architectural references, state collections, and archival fragments are brought together to reveal how cultural symbols are selected, framed, and legitimised. What appears decorative—particularly in the use of floral imagery—is unpacked as ideologically charged, shaped by long-standing associations that position certain forms as neutral while masking their political function.

The film works expand this investigation by restaging historical debates and institutional processes, allowing past narratives to resonate within the present. These reconstructions blur distinctions between fact and fiction, pointing to the persistence of ideological structures embedded within cultural production.

Beesley highlights how Cibic’s practice turns attention toward the systems that organise visibility—those that determine what is preserved, displayed, or omitted—revealing national identity not as a fixed entity, but as an ongoing process of selection, repetition, and negotiation.

Written to accompany Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Nika Grabar’s essay Landscape Windows Wallpaper reflects on how architecture, language, and ideology shape the representation of the state across shifting historical contexts.

Grabar situates the project within the layered history of Villa Bled and the Slovenian parliament, tracing how a single site can pass through multiple political systems while retaining—and concealing—traces of each. Through this lens, architecture emerges not as a stable expression of ideology, but as a mutable framework that survives political change, continually reinterpreted through new narratives and uses.

The essay foregrounds the role of language as a political medium, drawing on archival transcripts of parliamentary debates to reveal how ideology is constructed through rhetoric as much as through built form. In contrast to the linguistic authority of socialist systems, Grabar reflects on contemporary capitalism’s displacement of language by numerical value, raising questions about whether art can operate beyond both regimes.

Central to the text is the archive as a site of reconstruction and contestation. By revisiting documents, images, and forgotten spaces, Cibic’s work reactivates suppressed or overlooked histories, exposing the tensions between official narratives and their material remains. Architecture, interiors, and landscapes are shown to be saturated with ideology, even when presented as neutral or decorative.

Grabar ultimately reads Cibic’s installation as a spatial and temporal reframing lens: the Slovenian Pavilion becomes a constructed interior where past political debates, architectural forms, and visual motifs are reassembled into a new narrative environment. Through this process, For Our Economy and Culture interrogates how nations are staged, remembered, and continually rewritten—inviting viewers to consider how present-day cultural production frames both history and the futures it imagines.

Written in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Lina Džuverović’s essay On the Impossibility and Inevitability of Representation examines the tensions between cultural production and national representation through the lens of “soft power.”

The text frames culture as a key instrument through which nations construct and project their image internationally, often transforming complex social realities into simplified, marketable myths. Džuverović argues that artists and cultural producers are inevitably entangled in this process: even when critical of national agendas, their participation in exhibitions, funding structures, and international platforms contributes to the shaping of a nation’s symbolic identity.

Central to the essay is the paradox of representation—simultaneously impossible and unavoidable. While no artwork can fully embody a national identity, the structures of global cultural exchange, particularly events such as the Venice Biennial, continuously demand such representation. This creates a condition in which artists must navigate complicity and resistance, operating within systems they may seek to critique.

Through Cibic’s work, Džuverović highlights how this paradox can be exposed rather than resolved. By reenacting archival debates surrounding the selection of artworks for the Slovenian parliament at the time of its construction in 1957, the project reveals the mechanisms through which national iconography is continuously constructed and negotiated—reappearing through strikingly similar tactics across successive ideological frameworks.

The essay positions Cibic’s approach as a form of critical over-identification: by fully inhabiting the role of national representative, the work lays bare the structures of cultural myth-making, exposing the ideological frameworks that continue to shape how nations are staged and perceived.

Written in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Jane Rendell’s essay Setting the Scene: For What Might Have Been approaches the work through the lens of “site-writing,” treating criticism itself as a situated, performative practice.

Rendell focuses on Cibic’s film set in the (now Slovene) government’s Villa Bled, where an imagined dialogue between architect Vinko Glanz and a journalist unfolds within the very architecture under discussion. She interprets the building not only as subject but as a “setting” that stages relationships between characters, viewer, and history—drawing on psychoanalytic concepts to describe how space frames experience, memory, and interpretation.

The essay positions Cibic’s work as operating between construction and deconstruction. While the film assembles archival material into a speculative narrative, it simultaneously unravels historical coherence, exposing the layered and unstable nature of memory. Rendell emphasizes that history here is not presented as a fixed sequence of events, but as something continually reinterpreted, re-scripted, and emotionally inflected.

Rendell frames Cibic’s installation as a complex interior—both spatial and psychological—where past and present, fact and fiction, are interwoven. In this setting, Cibic’s work does not simply reconstruct history, but opens it up, inviting the viewer to actively renegotiate its meanings and imagine alternative narratives of what might have been.

In this extensive interview with architect and writer Miloš Kosec, Jasmina Cibic reflects on the central methodologies and political questions underpinning her artistic practice, focusing on the relationship between architecture, ideology, representation, and the instrumentalisation of culture as a form of soft power. The conversation traces the development of Cibic’s projects from For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale through Spielraum and NADA, situating her work within broader discussions surrounding Yugoslav modernism, transnationalism, feminist critique, and the aesthetics of political authority.

Cibic describes her practice as a form of “a double game,” in which she adopts and reenacts the visual languages of ideology in order to expose the mechanisms through which political systems aestheticise and legitimise themselves. Through highly constructed installations, films, performances, and archival reconstructions, she examines architecture and art not as neutral cultural forms, but as scenographic instruments through which states stage identity, consensus, and authority.

A major focus of the interview is the legacy of Yugoslav architecture and the Non-Aligned Movement. Cibic discusses her interest in the ways architecture functioned as a tool for constructing a new political language during the formation of socialist Yugoslavia and the emergence of the “third path” of non-alignment. Rather than approaching Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, she positions it as a completed ideological project that allows for a forensic reading of the relationship between aesthetics and political power.

The conversation also addresses Cibic’s engagement with overlooked architects and historical figures such as Vinko Glanz, Dragiša Brašovan, and Adolf Loos, as well as her interest in forgotten narratives, secondary actors, and the feminist shadows of dominant architectural histories. She reflects critically on contemporary forms of cultural production, discussing the changing political role of artists, the transformation of institutions, the limits of participatory art, and the increasing precarity of interdisciplinary practice within contemporary capitalism.

Throughout the interview, Cibic emphasises her interest in the “soft power” of art and architecture — the ways cultural forms frame, seduce, and naturalise authority while concealing ideological structures beneath aesthetics, ornament, and spectacle. Her projects, she argues, deliberately resist singular interpretation, functioning instead as complex theatrical environments in which audiences encounter the unstable mechanisms through which political realities are constructed and performed.

Written in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Suzana Milevska’s essay The Political Economy of the Name and Events of Representation in Jasmina Cibic’s Art examines the entanglement of naming, ideology, and national representation.

Milevska frames Cibic’s project as an investigation into the paradox of representing a nation, questioning whether any stable or “proper” criteria for such representation can exist. Drawing on archival material and historical debates, the work exposes the contradictions between national identity and international cultural positioning, revealing representation as a contested and unstable process.

Central to her analysis is the motif of naming, explored through Cibic’s use of the cave beetle Anophthalmus hitleri. This example foregrounds the political and ideological weight carried by names, demonstrating how systems of classification, identity, and value are embedded within broader social and historical frameworks. Milevska extends this logic to the artist’s role at the Biennial, suggesting a parallel between the named specimen and the artist positioned as a representative “sample” of a nation.

The essay places naming as both a symbolic contract and a site of power, shaped by competing systems of authority and interpretation. Drawing on philosophical and political theory, Milevska argues that acts of naming and renaming are never neutral but are bound to ideological structures that determine inclusion, exclusion, and legitimacy. In this sense, representation is inseparable from the politics of language and classification.

Milevska situates the central critical concern of Cibic’s project at the intersection of naming, value, and display, where representation operates as both a system of exchange and a cultural act. Rather than resolving its contradictions, the work sustains the unstable position between the artist as an individual subject and as a national signifier, foregrounding the conditions through which visibility is produced, assigned, and circulated.

In her text, Katia Baudin situates Cibic’s Gesamtkunstwerk The Spirit of Our Needs and the NADA film trilogy within the historical and architectural context of the Mies van der Rohe villas in Krefeld, framing the exhibition as a site-responsive inquiry into the entanglement of modernism, cultural production, and power.

She highlights Cibic’s research-driven, interdisciplinary approach, showing how the artist reactivates modernist architecture—particularly its function within world exhibitions and trade fairs—as a vehicle of national representation and soft power. The villas themselves emerge as spaces shaped by cultural capital, private wealth, and patriarchal structures, which Cibic critically reworks through installation and film.

Baudin emphasises how the work exposes the alignment of aesthetics with systems of authority and identity formation, using immersive environments and allegorical strategies to reveal the tension between artistic autonomy and ideological function. Rather than treating modernism as a neutral legacy, she frames Cibic’s project as a re-engagement with its contradictions, underscoring the continued political charge of cultural production within contemporary institutional contexts.

Written in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s solo exhibition at Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the conversation between Tevž Logar and Jasmina Cibic, centres on the conditions of cultural production in a shifting geopolitical landscape shaped by Brexit, the pandemic, and the rise of right-wing populism. Framed around Cibic’s exhibition Most Favoured Nation, the dialogue reflects on how contemporary art navigates systems of power, censorship, and institutional control.

Cibic describes how recent political and social transformations have reconfigured exhibition-making, limiting access to archives, altering institutional priorities, and reinforcing national frameworks of cultural presentation. These shifts, she argues, threaten decades of transnational cultural exchange while intensifying pressures toward simplification, self-censorship, and alignment with political and funding agendas.

Looking forward, Cibic positions her practice as an ongoing investigation into systems of control—national and supranational—through film, performance, and research-based methodologies. Her work seeks to map the evolving “power verticals” that shape cultural capital, while maintaining a commitment to complexity, critical thought, and the possibility of agency within cultural production.

In this interview with Chris Clarke, Cibic discusses her research-driven practice as an ongoing investigation into the relationship between culture and political power.

She reflects on her use of film as a narrative extension of installation, developing allegorical characters as archetypes that condense historical and political positions. These figures allow her to work with archival material while exposing the persistent similarities in political rhetoric across different regimes and time periods.

Cibic emphasises her interest in the construction and manipulation of archives, focusing on what is omitted, censored, or translated, and using these gaps to reimagine history through a feminist and critical lens. Across works such as The Gift, the NADA trilogy, and State of Illusion, she examines how art and architecture are instrumentalised, often revealing that the processes of selection, mediation, and censorship are more significant than the final cultural object itself.

Architecture plays a central role in her films, functioning not merely as a setting but as an active agent that choreographs action and embodies ideological histories. These sites—often former centres of political power—are approached as spaces of reenactment, where past and present narratives intersect.

Cibic also addresses the shifting role of culture today, arguing that traditional notions of soft power have been transformed under neoliberal conditions, where cultural production is increasingly tied to economic value and institutional survival. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, she positions her work as a platform for critical reflection, using humour, allegory, and repetition to expose the cyclical and often absurd dynamics of power, representation, and ideology.

iLiana Fokianaki’s essay situates the Cibict’s work within a broader reflection on the shifting conditions of state power and its cultural manifestations.

The essay traces how the artist’s practice critically examines the evolution of political authority, from early 20th-century models of social welfare and soft power to contemporary forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on histories of architecture, culture, and political spectacle, Fokianaki highlights how art and cultural production have long functioned as instruments of persuasion, governance, and ideological framing.

Central to the analysis is Cibic’s film The Gift, which positions culture itself as a political tool—operating simultaneously as a vehicle of power and a site of critique. Through staged narratives, symbolic architectures, and archetypal figures, the work reveals how cultural forms contribute to the construction of national identity, diplomacy, and influence. These elements combine to form what Fokianaki describes as a “visual genealogy” of power, connecting historical strategies of representation to their contemporary expressions.

Fokianaki further interprets Cibic’s work as a practice that exposes the mechanisms through which power operates while maintaining a critical distance from them. In this reading, the artist’s engagement with culture becomes a means of examining how systems of representation are produced, circulated, and sustained.

The essay positions Cibic’s work as a critical lens through which to reconsider the role of culture in shaping political narratives, opening space for reflection on how these structures might be understood—and potentially reimagined.

Gordana Nikolić’s essay approaches The Pavilion through the lens of spectacle. Writing in relation to Cibic’s earlier projects, she situates the work within a broader inquiry into the visual languages through which political power stages itself.

Her focus rests on the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition—a building that once embodied the ambition of a modern, outward-looking state, yet has largely disappeared from dominant historical narratives. For Nikolić, this absence is telling: it reveals how certain forms of modernism are canonised while others, particularly those emerging from the periphery, are marginalised or forgotten.

Cibic’s reconstruction of the pavilion becomes, in this reading, less an act of recovery than a critical intervention into how history is assembled. Nikolić underscores the artist’s attention to the seductive qualities of modernist aesthetics—their capacity to persuade, to conceal, and to operate as tools of cultural diplomacy. Through comparative references and archival substitutions, Cibic exposes how these visual strategies circulate across different ideological contexts, producing a shared language of power.

At the centre of the installation, the act of building is performed by a group of women, a gesture Nikolić reads as a deliberate disruption of the masculinist frameworks that have historically underpinned both architecture and state formation. The theatrical staging further distances the work from any claim to documentary truth, instead foregrounding the processes through which narratives are constructed, rehearsed, and maintained.

Nikolić ultimately positions The Pavilion as a re-staging of a historical spectacle that reveals its own mechanisms, opening a space to reconsider how national identity is fabricated, remembered, and continuously rewritten.

Written as the foreword to Cibic’s monograph Spielraum, Alessandro Vincentelli’s text frames the project as the culmination of the artist’s long-term research into the entanglement of art, architecture, and political power—here extended across three exhibitions staged in distinct national public institutions, each increasingly shaped by the pressures of rising right-wing politics.

Drawing on histories of failed or transformed states, the project examines how visual languages—ranging from monumental architecture to rhetorical performance—have been mobilised to construct and sustain ideological narratives, and what remains once these systems fracture. Through film, installation, and performative re-enactment, Cibic assembles archival fragments, scripted dialogues, and symbolic forms into what Vincentelli describes as a “theatre of voices”: a layered staging of competing perspectives that both exposes and reconstitutes the mechanisms of authority.

Central to this expanded framework is Cibic’s sustained engagement with the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement, not as a fixed historical subject but as a lens through which to interrogate contemporary conditions. Across the trilogy, architecture functions as both stage and protagonist—its lifecycle traced from ideological conception to eventual obsolescence—revealing how built forms once tasked with representing collective identity become unstable carriers of meaning over time.

In bringing these works together, the publication extends beyond historical reflection into a critical reading of the present. It foregrounds the role of “soft power” in shaping public consciousness—where persuasion, aesthetics, and desire replace overt coercion—and situates Cibic’s feminist approach as a counter-reading of nation-building itself. By questioning who speaks, who frames, and who is rendered visible, the project exposes the structures through which cultural authority is produced and maintained.

As Europe once again confronts ideological fragmentation and the resurgence of nationalist narratives, this body of work—and the exhibitions from which it emerges—operates as both analysis and warning. It insists on the cyclical nature of history while opening a speculative space: a Spielraum, or room for manoeuvre, in which alternative forms of collective imagination and political articulation might still be rehearsed.

In his essay, Vid Simoniti interprets Jasmina Cibic’s series The Arrangement as a contemporary reworking of the vanitas tradition, where beauty and decay become a lens through which to reflect on power and ideals.

He describes how Cibic constructs floral portraits of international institutions by inviting representatives of human rights organisations to nominate flowers, transforming decorative arrangements into symbolic representations of bodies such as the International Criminal Court or the UN Human Rights Council. This gesture extends Cibic’s ongoing interest in soft power, focusing on the aesthetic and symbolic tools through which political entities shape their image.

Simoniti contrasts the image-making strategies of nation states with those of international organisations, which must project neutrality rather than unity. He situates this within the broader tensions of international justice, noting its dependence on geopolitical power and the uneven enforcement of its principles.

Rather than presenting a purely critical view, the essay reads Cibic’s work as holding a more ambiguous position. Drawing on the historical symbolism of vanitas painting, the wilting flowers become a metaphor not only for fragility and impermanence but also for the precarious existence of ideals such as human rights.

Simoniti positions The Arrangement as a meditation on the limits and possibilities of these ideals—suspended between scepticism and hope, where the imagery invites reflection on what should be preserved, and why.

In his essay The Archive as Strategy and Method in Jasmina Cibic’s Work, Matthieu Lelièvre examines how Cibic uses the archive as an active tool for questioning set grand narratives of political and national power.

Lelièvre describes Cibic’s practice as one that identifies highly specific historical “traces” and re-stages them within new scenographic contexts, also chosen with precision to allow for alternative world building thinking processes to emerge. Through this, she interrogates the reliability of sources and the mechanisms through which history is written, transmitted, and legitimised. Her work draws on extensive research and collaboration, assembling archives, architectural forms, performances, and texts into a total work that obsessively studies the relationship between art and political and national power.

The essay highlights how Cibic focuses not only on cultural objects but on the systems that produce and circulate them—such as political commissions, institutional frameworks, and cultural diplomacy. By reactivating moments such as performances, exhibitions, and architectural projects (including those linked to Cold War contexts and international exhibitions), she reveals how art always operates within state apparatuses and contributes to shaping collective identity.

Lelièvre also emphasises Cibic’s interest in the gaps and omissions within archives—the missing, edited, or suppressed elements—as sites of critical potential. By working with these absences, she creates speculative narratives that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and construction.

The essay presents Cibic’s engagement with the archive as an ongoing method: a way of analysing dominant narratives and exposing the ideological forces that sustain them, while opening space for alternative readings of history and its contemporary urgencies.