Flock (after Pierre-Émile Legrain)

Flock is a performative sculptural installation based on archival plans for a bird cage designed in 1924 by the Parisian furniture designer and bookbinder Pierre-Émile Legrain. The original structure was commissioned by the collector and couturier Jacques Doucet to sit beneath Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which Doucet had purchased directly from Picasso’s studio. Suspended between decorative object, display apparatus, and symbol of cultivated taste, the cage embodied the intertwined histories of collecting, exoticism, and modernist spectacle that shaped early twentieth-century European interiors.

Using Legrain’s design as a prototype, Jasmina Cibic reconstructs and reconfigures the cage in collaboration with craftsmen and bird trainers, transforming a historical display object into a performative spatial device. Each iteration of the work is adapted to its exhibition context, generating shifting relationships between architecture, choreography, spectatorship, and control.

At the centre of the installation is a live bird of prey trained to move between two replicas of the cage. This repeated flight destabilises the object’s original function as an ornamental container, transforming it instead into a stage for negotiating freedom, discipline, attraction, and containment. The bird becomes both performer and subject within a carefully orchestrated system of looking, exposing the latent violence embedded within architectures of display.

By reactivating an object conceived during the formative years of European modernism — a period deeply entangled with colonial collecting practices and the invention of the “exotic” within the modern gaze — Flock interrogates the ideological frameworks embedded within exhibition design and systems of representation. The work examines how spaces of culture organise visibility, desire, and authority, while questioning the relationship between spectatorship and control that continues to structure contemporary institutional environments.

Oscillating between sculpture, theatre, and live choreography, Flock reflects on the exhibition space itself as an ideological apparatus: a site where bodies, objects, and narratives are framed, disciplined, and aestheticised through acts of display.