Ornamental Rashes

Ornamental Rashes is a special edition silkscreen print that extends Jasmina Cibic’s ongoing investigations into the political entanglements between botanical extraction, ornament, and aesthetics within ideological systems of power.

The print reworks a series of engravings based on the iron grates, fences, and ornamental barriers of early botanical gardens and greenhouses—architectural structures that functioned not merely as decorative enclosures, but as technologies of control within colonial networks of extraction and exchange. These sites operated as laboratories for the acclimatisation and circulation of economically valuable plants, enabling European powers to reorganise distant ecologies according to systems of ownership, classification, and imperial expansion.

Across the surface of the print, the rigid geometries of these iron frameworks are interrupted by phrases drawn simultaneously from botanical terminology and political rhetoric. Detached from their original contexts, the words oscillate between horticultural instruction and diplomatic strategy, exposing the shared vocabulary through which cultivation, governance, persuasion, and containment are enacted.

In Ornamental Rashes, decoration itself becomes political evidence. Floral motifs and botanical imagery—so often deployed within governmental interiors, diplomatic chambers, and spaces of political authority as symbols of neutrality, civility, or benign beauty—are repositioned as traces of far more violent historical processes. Beneath the ornamental surface lies a history of colonial extraction, environmental manipulation, and the systematic reorganisation of both land and knowledge.

The work reflects Cibic’s broader interest in how aesthetic forms naturalise ideological structures, asking how systems of representation continue to conceal the political economies embedded within them. Here, the ornamental barrier functions simultaneously as protection, display, and exclusion—a threshold through which histories of power continue to persist beneath the language of beauty and order.