Weave Common Myth

Produced for the occasion of Jasmina Cibic’s The Gift and presented through a collaboration between the Barbican and Film London, this special edition brings together a newly commissioned essay by philosopher Vid Simoniti alongside a signed silkscreen print by the artist.

The Gift is a film and research project examining the political “gifting” of culture across twentieth-century Europe — from architecture and music to choreography, monuments, and public ceremony — tracing how art has historically functioned as a vehicle of soft power and statecraft. Filmed within architectures that were themselves political gifts, including the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, and the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria, the work stages a fictional competition to imagine the “perfect” political gift.

The edition was conceived to mark and celebrate the coming together of the many public museums, archives, institutions, and cultural workers whose collaboration made the wider research project possible — including Film London, macLYON, steirischer Herbst, Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, the Museum of Yugoslavia, the United Nations Geneva, the French Communist Party and numerous curators, archivists, researchers, and artists who contributed to the development of the work across several years.