20th Century

The sculptural object forms part of Jasmina Cibic’s 20th Century series, a body of work that draws on museological display systems and modernist zoological architecture to interrogate their entanglement with colonial histories. It invokes the scenographic language of the circus alongside architectures of control, performance, and the fantasy of otherness.

Extending Cibic’s ongoing investigation into how aesthetic and spatial regimes operate as instruments of influence, the sculpture foregrounds the act of display as a site where perception and ideology are actively produced. It functions simultaneously as device and metaphor—a structure that choreographs vision while revealing the patriarchal politics embedded in systems of visibility.

Conceived as a hybrid between pedestal, perch, and design object, the work draws on the formal vocabulary of iconic 20th-century modernism—forms historically endowed with cultural authority and symbolic capital. Reconfigured as supports for display, these structures expose the hierarchies they once concealed, making visible the conditions under which objects are framed, encountered, and assigned value.

Through this shift, the sculpture relinquishes any claim to autonomy. Its meaning emerges instead through the frameworks that position it—museological, architectural, and ideological. In doing so, the work reflects on how objects come to matter: not as self-contained entities, but as products of the systems that stage and sustain their visibility.