(Post) Socialist Futures: Jasmina Cibic’s Art for a World to Come

The future is a scary place. At least it seems that way from my vantage point in late summer 2025. With climate disaster, genocide, war, and rising authoritarian regimes eviscerating populations and wreaking havoc at unprecedented scales it is difficult to imagine, let alone believe, that things will get better and not much worse for the majority of the world’s population. Amid the violence and instability of the present moment, envisioning an equitable and sustainable future for the world-at-large can seem like an exceptionally tall order. And yet, the last time humanity was on the brink of a catastrophe of this magnitude—roughly a century ago, in the years leading up to the first and second world wars—the impossible task of envisioning radical and revolutionary futures was precisely what avant-garde artists sought to do.

My aim here is not to rehash the triumphs and pitfalls of avant-garde art. I am instead interested in understanding how and why artists today from across Southeastern Europe are returning with renewed enthusiasm to avant-garde artworks, ideals, and revolutionary sensibilities. This is not the first time contemporary artists have resurrected the avant-garde’s legacy. One needs to look no further than the neo-, post-, and retro-avant-garde movements that defined much of art in the latter half of the twentieth century. The difference this time around, as I see it, is in the lack of a cynical approach and protective distance that has long characterized postmodern art’s relationship to politics and power.

In Return of the Real Hal Foster describes the limitations of this cynical approach via the artwork of North American neo-geo (or neo-geometric conceptual) artists of the 1980s whose aesthetic mimicked the geometric compositions of interwar Constructivists. Artists such as Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner and others, he argues,

reiterated [geometric abstraction] not to redeem it critically but to compound it cynically. At times, they appeared to mock this abstraction in order to distance it, to suggest that it was reified, failed beyond redemption, not they. At other times, they appeared to embrace this failure as if it were a form of protection: the paradoxical defense of the already defeated, the already dead.^[1]

Thirty years have passed since Foster published Return of the Real in 1996. And the dominant tendency he diagnoses—a cynically cool, detached, and ideologically indifferent art, complacent in its ability to call out the failures and shortcomings of its predecessors—has faded into the horizon. In its place, various modes of activist and politically-engaged art (relational aesthetics, participatory art, community-based practices, and the like) have emerged, with some movements attempting to narrow the cynical distance that Foster describes. Still, few contemporary artists have been able or willing to close the gap. Why the reluctance? What would it mean to do so?

In part, it would mean creating art that no longer finds critical value in denying or distancing itself from the avant-garde’s purported failures. Or from its original sin, as Boris Groys might put it, of believing that art can shape politics and transform the world, and that it should do so forcefully and irrespective of dire consequences—namely, the threat of art becoming a mere tool for political power and authoritarian control.^[2] It would thus also mean creating art that eschews the comforts and assurances of political ideological innocence—of staying on the sidelines and keeping one’s hands clean, so to speak^[3]—in favor of that transformative, yet risky, avant-garde gambit of political agency and complicity—of insisting that art has a seat at the table and skin in the game.

So what does all this have to do with the future? And with the art of Jasmina Cibic? Briefly put, I argue that Cibic’s artwork closes the gap that countless artists have sought to maintain or deny. Her art does so by pulling on that tangled thread of agency and complicity. Using renowned works of civic architecture—parliament buildings, statehouses, city halls, and monuments—as the stage sets for her films and performances, Cibic creates meticulously choreographed productions that penetrate the halls of power. Within these potent spaces, she positions actors, performers, and recently herself as skilled players in the game of politics, as agents immersed in their surroundings and in the tasks of deliberation, negotiation, and world-making.

While her art is unmistakably political, Cibic rejects the label of activist art. “Artistic practices that are activist,” she explains, “all reside outside of the system of power. But you cannot make change or even have a conversation there.”^[4] She instead describes her work as an “agent of permeability,” or an entity that slips inside and moves between political ideological structures and systems of power.^[5] In what follows I examine Cibic’s films, in particular Tear Down and Rebuild from 2015 and Beacons from 2023, through this lens of permeability. I liken this term to what Kristin Romberg, writing about the Russian Constructivist theorist Aleskei Gan, defines as an aesthetics of embeddedness, and Hal Foster citing Marx, describes as “the compromised position” of avant-garde artists as “double agents,” “go-betweens,” and “intermediaries of power.”^[6] Drawing on the insights of Foster, Romberg, and others, this article defines the contours of what permeability means to the artist—its critical value and limitations— and considers how Cibic uses site-specificity and the voice as tools for envisioning and embodying this intermediary quality. With regard to the voice, I turn to Mladen Dolar’s groundbreaking work on the topic.

Ultimately, what interests me is not the extent to which Cibic copies or quotes the art of the avant-garde, like many have before her. But rather how her art penetrates, permeates, and metabolizes a transformative yet too readily discarded mode of avant-gardist critique. Her artwork does so dialectically. Films like Tear Down and Rebuild and Beacons scour artistic and revolutionary histories, scrutinizing their ideological structures and material forms, and gleaning from within imperfect or disused models still vital frameworks, or what Marijeta Bozovic calls “undetonated alternatives,” that give form to new aesthetic and political possibilities.^[7]

As to the question of the future, Cibic’s artwork, I argue, explores the critical potential that exists and the horizons that emerge when art is willing to forego the familiar safeguards of the artist as political outsider criticizing power always only at a distance. The state-sanctioned atrocities and acts of violence and intimidation that are defining our contemporary era, however, place this approach under considerable scrutiny. And so it seems necessary to ask: what would it mean to assume the role of the artist-as-political-insider at this moment when political power is wielded egregiously and with impunity to censor, intimidate, and erase populations? Under such conditions, can there still be value in the work of artists who operate within these corrupted halls of power, not as witnesses or critics, but as insiders and active participants who remain ready, as Cibic puts it, “to drag [their counterpart, their adversary] to the negotiating table?”^[8]