Most Favoured Nation

Most Favoured Nation brings together a selection of Jasmina Cibic’s recent works alongside new commissions, forming a unified inquiry into the mechanisms of soft power and their inscription onto the female body. Throughout modern history, the female body has frequently been instrumentalised by national myths and political ideologies as a vehicle for projecting power, shaping both international audiences and domestic constituencies. In Cibic’s work, these strategies become a metaphor for the evolving choreography between culture and political authority.

The works assembled in the exhibition examine the rituals of patriarchy embedded within nation-building, focusing on moments of political rupture and identity crisis across Europe. Throughout her practice, Cibic has employed a feminist reading of historical archives, using official documents, speeches, architectural plans, and cultural artefacts to reveal the scenographies through which power is staged and maintained. At the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, these investigations are brought into dialogue with contemporary conditions, asking how culture responds when political priorities begin to reshape the institutions, infrastructures, and actors that sustain it.

The exhibition’s title derives from the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle, a cornerstone of multilateral trade agreements that guarantees equal treatment among participating parties. Cibic adopts this legal and economic framework as a conceptual lens through which to examine the circulation of cultural value within Europe. Beyond international trade, MFN clauses are also used within entertainment contracts to guarantee equitable treatment among artists and performers of comparable standing. Transposed into the cultural sphere, the principle becomes a means of interrogating the uneven distribution of visibility, opportunity, and protection within systems shaped by national interests and political influence.

Drawing on historical case studies in which culture became entangled in ideological struggles and geopolitical conflicts, Cibic considers how artistic production is repeatedly mobilised in the service of political agendas. The artist’s work speaks directly to a contemporary moment marked by renewed nationalist rhetoric, democratic uncertainty, and growing pressures on cultural institutions. Rather than treating these developments as exceptional, the exhibition traces their historical precedents, revealing recurring patterns through which culture is instrumentalised to legitimise authority, revise collective memory, and reinforce existing power structures.

At the heart of Most Favoured Nation lies a question that resonates throughout Cibic’s practice: what forms of agency remain available to cultural producers when culture itself becomes a site of political negotiation and growing (self) censorship? By examining the enduring entanglement of art, ideology, and governance, the exhibition exposes the fragile position of culture within contemporary Europe, while inviting viewers to consider the roles artists, institutions, and audiences play within these shifting constellations of power.