The Palace

For this exhibition, Jasmina Cibic transformed the former palace of industrialist Maurycy Poznański into a reflection on solidarity, political desire, and the instrumentalisation of culture in times of crisis. Through film, photography, sculpture, and sound, the exhibition examined how art and architecture have been mobilised to forge collective identities, project political ideals, and negotiate social divisions.

What do the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, and the former residence of a textile magnate in Łódź have in common? Who has the authority to reunite a divided society: the architect, the politician, or the artist? How is a national aesthetic constructed, and what political ambitions are embedded within the act of giving? These questions formed the starting point of Cibic’s investigation into culture as a vehicle of soft power.

At the centre of the exhibition was The Gift, a film that explored the notion of culture as a political gift capable of healing a fractured nation. Through allegory and performance, the film presented three finalists competing to offer the ideal gift to a divided society: an Engineer, a Diplomat, and an Artist. Each proposed a different vision of how culture might restore communication and cohesion between opposing groups.

The film was shot within a series of buildings that themselves embody acts of political gifting: Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, donated by the architect to the Party; the Palais des Nations in Geneva, assembled through contributions from member states of the League of Nations; and Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, presented by the Soviet Union to the Republic of Poland. These sites were conceived as monuments to education, diplomacy, culture, and international cooperation, yet they also reveal how architecture can operate as an instrument of political influence and ideological projection.

For Cibic, these buildings are more than historical backdrops. They stand as material traces of successive attempts to construct transnational alliances through culture, from the interwar period and post-war reconstruction to the ideological struggles of the late twentieth century. The exhibition examined how such gestures sought to foster solidarity while simultaneously advancing particular political interests, revealing culture’s dual role as a tool of cohesion and persuasion.

Extending beyond the film, the exhibition assembled a constellation of political gifts and symbolic objects that testified to faith in collective ideals. These included photographic portraits of roses bred and named after politicians associated with anti-fascist and European projects, relay batons presented to the president of former Yugoslavia as symbols of unity among its republics, and a photographic portrait of the International Collection of Modern Art—an extraordinary gift donated by European artists in response to the appeal of the avant-garde “a.r.” group and entrusted to the care of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

Alongside these examples of generosity and transnational solidarity, the exhibition also considered the failures of cultural diplomacy. One such case was the unrealised flag of the League of Nations. Despite receiving numerous proposals from artists and designers, no official design was ever adopted, out of concern that privileging one emblem over another might undermine the organisation’s cohesion. For Cibic, such failed attempts at symbolic unification are as revealing as the successful ones. They expose the limits of soft power and invite reflection on culture’s capacity to resist complete appropriation by political authority.

Bringing together architecture, film, archival material, and symbolic objects, the exhibition traced the afterlives of political gifts and the ambitions they carried. It asked what remains of the ideals invested in them, and whether culture might still offer a space for imagining forms of solidarity beyond the structures of power that seek to instrumentalise it.