NADA

NADA is a publication that brings together Jasmina Cibic’s film trilogy—Nada: Act I, Act II, and Act III – The Exhibition—alongside essays by Katia Baudin, Vladimir Kulić, and Erika Balsom, as well as an extended conversation with the artist.

The book examines how architecture, art, and performance operate as instruments of state power and national representation. Moving across key sites of modernism—from the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Expo to Aarhus City Hall and Mies van der Rohe’s villas in Krefeld—it traces how cultural production is mobilised to construct, stage, and circulate the image of the nation.

Central to the publication is the idea of a triangular relationship between architecture, the state, and the nation, explored through reenactment, choreography, and scripted dialogue drawn from historical archives. Across the trilogy, Cibic reveals how modernist aesthetics—often associated with universality and progress—are repeatedly appropriated by different political systems, exposing their ideological flexibility.

The book also foregrounds the role of gender within these structures, particularly through the figure of “Mother Nation,” which embodies the contradictions between symbolic representation and political exclusion.

Combining visual material, film stills, and critical texts, NADA positions cultural production as both a tool of governance and a site of critique—unfolding the tensions between ideology, authorship, and representation that continue to shape contemporary political and artistic realities.