Forged Territories

Forged Territories is a photographic series realised within one of the preferred locations of the British film and television industry—sites routinely used to stand in for foreign and “exotic” landscapes. Within these constructed environments, the artist installs sculptural plinths supporting taxidermy animals sourced from a prop rental studio, a primary supplier to the advertising industry.

The series critically and ironically engages with the gap between expectation and reality upon which industries of image-making and desire depend. These landscapes, already designed as substitutes, become stages for further acts of substitution, where authenticity is both performed and displaced.

Cibic’s large-scale photographs lead the viewer into an absurd animal kingdom, where dislocated creatures confront monumental forms and unfamiliar bestial objects. Each image appears as a fragment of an unfolding narrative, simulating the unstable and ultimately expendable nature of the “industry of new experience.” Within this framework, the animal functions as an index of place—an “authentic” marker of destination—while simultaneously revealing the mechanisms through which exoticism is produced and circulated by media industries.

The works operate as images of fictional tourist attractions. A stag, an ostrich—each elevated on a plinth—assume the status of sculptures, monumental presences within an artificial landscape. The absent object of devotion is replaced by its own surrogate; the site of encounter becomes a site of projection. As the title suggests, territories are not discovered but forged. The animal, recast as a monument or fetish, is offered to the spectator as both evidence and illusion.