This Machine Builds Nations

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.

Ameli Klein’s text examines Jasmina Cibic’s work as a sustained investigation into the relationship between art, architecture, and ideology, focusing on how cultural production participates in systems of power. She frames Cibic’s practice as one that reveals the mechanisms through which nations construct and project identity—particularly through architecture, exhibition formats, and performative staging.

Klein emphasises Cibic’s use of historical material and reconstruction, noting how the artist reworks archives, fragments, and absent structures to expose the instability of official narratives. Rather than presenting history as fixed, Cibic’s works demonstrate how it is continuously rewritten through visual and spatial strategies.

A key thread in Klein’s analysis is the role of performance and display: bodies, buildings, and images are choreographed to articulate ideological positions, often masking underlying tensions between political ideals and their realities. Cibic’s work thus operates in a space between fiction and documentation, where constructed narratives reveal the artificiality of national myths.

Ultimately, Klein positions Cibic’s practice as a critical form of “world-making”—one that dissects the visual languages of power while proposing alternative ways of reading history, identity, and cultural representation.

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.