The Gift Ecology

The Gift Ecology continues Jasmina Cibic’s long-term investigation into the political gift as a mechanism through which power, obligation, and reciprocity circulate between states. Drawing on Marcel Mauss's understanding of the gift as an exchange that binds its participants into enduring relations, the exhibition examines how culture and nature have been instrumentalised within diplomatic systems, particularly during moments of political and social transformation. Focusing on the Non-Aligned Movement and its wider geopolitical context, the exhibition proposes an ecology in which artworks, animals, plants, monuments, and even human tears become participants in political exchange.

Bringing together film, photography, sculpture, and archival material, The Gift Ecology asks what becomes of these gifts once the political alliances that produced them dissolve. Rather than remaining passive symbols of nationhood, Cibic restores agency to the gifted objects themselves, allowing human and non-human actors alike to become witnesses to histories of extraction, solidarity, and resilience.

The photographic series The Gift Ecology draws on Yugoslav government archives documenting diplomatic exchanges of animals between member states of the Non-Aligned Movement. Originally presented as emblems of friendship and geopolitical alliance, these animals participated in the construction of a new transnational political sphere positioned outside the Cold War divide. Cibic intervenes in these documents by erasing their surrounding landscapes, isolating the animals from their original ideological settings. No longer illustrations of statecraft, they emerge as autonomous protagonists, carrying the traces of colonial extraction and diplomatic desire while outliving the political systems they once served.

The exhibition's central work, Mothers (2025), was developed through the archive of the Gallery of the Non-Aligned—the only museum dedicated to artworks gifted by heads of state, ambassadors, and cultural institutions of the Non-Aligned Movement. Selecting only female sculptural figures from the collection, Cibic transforms these allegorical "mother nations" into an evolving constellation of bodies. Illuminated like precious artefacts, the sculptures slowly fracture, disintegrate, and reassemble into new configurations, suggesting resilience not as permanence but as continuous transformation. The accompanying soundscape combines the contemporary spectacle of destruction with fragments of historical debates on cultural sovereignty and self-determination, recasting these sculptures as living witnesses to unfinished political futures.

The exhibition concludes with a collaborative project developed with members of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Invited to donate their tears, participants contributed material that was photographed under a microscope and transformed into images resembling planetary terrains. These microscopic landscapes are transferred onto engraved brass plates and culminate in a suspended bronze globe whose continents, islands, and waterways are entirely derived from crystallised tears. Reversing the extractive logic through which maps, monuments, and globes have historically asserted imperial authority, the work proposes an alternative world imagined through care, advocacy, and collective responsibility.

Together, the works comprising The Gift Ecology reconsider the histories of political gifting beyond diplomacy alone. They reveal how exchanges of animals, artworks, emotions, and symbolic objects have shaped both historical alliances and contemporary understandings of solidarity. Against the backdrop of collapsing international institutions and renewed geopolitical fragmentation, the exhibition asks whether new ecologies of reciprocity might still be imagined—and whether culture can once again become a space for mutual care rather than political extraction.