Stagecraft – Une mise en scène du pouvoir

Conceived as an immersive total environment, the exhibition brought together film, sculpture, scenography, architecture, and live performance to examine the relationship between political authority and cultural production. Throughout the installation, Cibic explored the parallels between statecraft and stagecraft, treating exhibition-making itself as a performative apparatus through which power is rehearsed, enacted, and legitimised.

Visitors entered through a transitional architectural environment whose illuminated ceiling and constructed scenography evoked the visual language of modernist theatre. This led into a reconstructed setting derived from The Miraculous Mandarin, Béla Bartók’s controversial pantomime ballet, as it was presented by Yugoslavia at the 1958 Brussels World Exposition. The ballet’s narrative centres on a young woman compelled by three pimps to lure passing men into a trap, transforming her body into a site of transaction, exploitation, and desire. Cibic reactivated this allegorical structure as a lens through which to examine the recurring feminisation of nationhood and culture within political representation. Recast as a symbolic Mother Nation, the female protagonist became a metaphor for culture itself: repeatedly mobilised, exchanged, and exploited in the service of ideological, diplomatic, and national ambitions. By revisiting a work repeatedly subjected to censorship and political reinterpretation throughout the twentieth century, the artist exposed the enduring entanglement of gender, cultural production, and state power.

At the centre of the exhibition was the three-channel film The Gift (2021), presented in its final form to the public for the first time. The culmination of three years of research, filming, and international collaboration, the work investigates the role of gifting in the formation of European (trans)national identities, examining how architecture, art, music, and dance have historically functioned as instruments of diplomacy, ideological projection, and soft power. Drawing on archival research into political gifting and cultural diplomacy, the film follows three allegorical protagonists—the Gifts of Art, Music, and Architecture—as they compete to become the ideal gift for a divided nation. Their proposals are evaluated by allegorical embodiments of the Four Fundamental Freedoms within the futuristic assembly hall of Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, itself a political gift from the architect to the Party.

Filmed across a series of landmark sites shaped by acts of political gifting—including the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria, and Niemeyer’s Paris headquarters—The Gift examines culture’s dual role as both a symbolic bearer of political ideals and a Trojan horse for diplomatic interests. As the competition unfolds, the promise of culture as a unifying force gradually unravels, exposing the tensions between aesthetic ambition, political utility, and ideological control. Moving between historical aspirations for international solidarity and their contemporary fragmentation, the film reflects on the erosion of post-war internationalist ideals and the resurgence of nationalist politics across Europe.

Conceived against a backdrop of rising nationalism and the weakening of international solidarity, the exhibition positioned culture simultaneously as a site of political instrumentalisation and a potential space of resistance. Through its orchestration of moving image, performance, architecture, and exhibition design, Stagecraft examined how political identities are staged, negotiated, and sustained, revealing culture as a powerful agent in both the construction and contestation of collective futures.