An Atmosphere of Joyful Contemplation

An Atmosphere of Joyful Contemplation centres on a series of handwoven kilim textiles and a live vocal performance that together examine the entanglement of ornament, nationalism and political staging. Traditionally associated with domestic labour and vernacular Balkan craft, kilims became deeply embedded within the visual construction of national identity across the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans more broadly. Throughout the twentieth century, textile motifs and weaving traditions were repeatedly mobilised as carriers of “authentic” folk culture — aesthetic devices through which emerging nation states projected continuity, territorial belonging and cultural uniqueness.

In socialist Yugoslavia after the Second World War, monumental tapestries and woven works became one of the state’s key artistic commissions. Installed within government buildings, diplomatic interiors and pavilions for international expositions, these textiles functioned as soft architectural instruments of representation: portable images of ideological refinement, labour and collective identity. Cibic reactivates this history by embedding within the kilims the words statecraft and stagecraft, collapsing political governance into theatrical production.

The kilims remain deliberately unfinished. Spools of thread, embroidery needles and traces of repair are left visible throughout the installation, transforming weaving into a performative act of continuous revision rather than completion. The textile becomes a metaphor for history itself: perpetually rewoven, repaired and re-staged according to changing ideological needs. In Cibic’s work, the loom operates simultaneously as domestic space, political apparatus and stage set.

This logic extends into the accompanying performance, in which female singers occupy sculptural textile structures suspended within the installation. Reclining, singing and embroidering, the performers enter into positions historically assigned to women as custodians of tradition, labour and memory, while simultaneously unsettling them. Their voices activate the installation as a living stage where female bodies become both bearers and disruptors of national narratives. Neither entirely performers nor symbolic figures, they appear suspended between mother, muse, worker and political allegory.

The performance unfolds as a cyclical act without resolution. Songs, gestures and fragments of political rhetoric repeat and unravel, suggesting histories that refuse closure. Through this convergence of textile, voice and choreography, Cibic exposes the theatre of nation-building itself: a process sustained through repetition, maintenance and the continual performance of collective myths.