In Dialogue

In Dialogue, Visual and Applied Art Programme of SCS Centar-Jadro, Skopje, 2021, is a publication bringing together a selection of conversations, essays, and critical reflections developed through the programme’s ongoing commitment to contemporary artistic discourse and experimental cultural production in North Macedonia and the wider region. Founded as an independent cultural platform, Jadro operates as a space for critical exchange between artists, curators, theorists, and institutions, with a particular focus on socially engaged practices and the political dimensions of contemporary art.

The publication includes an extended conversation between Jasmina Cibic and curator Jovanka Popova, whose curatorial work has consistently focused on contemporary art in relation to politics, memory, feminist methodologies, and post-socialist cultural contexts. Across the dialogue, Popova and Cibic examine the central questions underpinning Cibic’s practice: the instrumentalisation of art and architecture within systems of state power, the role of “soft power” in cultural production, and the ways political ideologies become embedded within visual culture, performance, and institutional space.

The discussion traces Cibic’s methodologies of working with archives, historical reenactment, choreography, film, and scenography, foregrounding her interest in exposing the mechanisms through which collective identities are staged and maintained. Topics range from the politics of national representation at the Venice Biennale to the architectures of diplomacy, the afterlives of Yugoslav modernism, feminist approaches to political history, and the tensions between critique and complicity within contemporary cultural institutions.

Rather than functioning as a conventional artist interview, the conversation unfolds as a broader reflection on the ethical and political responsibilities of cultural production today. Addressing questions of censorship, nationalism, institutional self-regulation, and the role of art in moments of ideological fracture, the publication positions artistic practice as a critical space through which systems of power can be simultaneously dissected, re-performed, and contested.