Framing the Space

In his essay The Archive as Strategy and Method in Jasmina Cibic’s Work, Matthieu Lelièvre examines how Cibic uses the archive as an active tool for questioning set grand narratives of political and national power.

Lelièvre describes Cibic’s practice as one that identifies highly specific historical “traces” and re-stages them within new scenographic contexts, also chosen with precision to allow for alternative world building thinking processes to emerge. Through this, she interrogates the reliability of sources and the mechanisms through which history is written, transmitted, and legitimised. Her work draws on extensive research and collaboration, assembling archives, architectural forms, performances, and texts into a total work that obsessively studies the relationship between art and political and national power.

The essay highlights how Cibic focuses not only on cultural objects but on the systems that produce and circulate them—such as political commissions, institutional frameworks, and cultural diplomacy. By reactivating moments such as performances, exhibitions, and architectural projects (including those linked to Cold War contexts and international exhibitions), she reveals how art always operates within state apparatuses and contributes to shaping collective identity.

Lelièvre also emphasises Cibic’s interest in the gaps and omissions within archives—the missing, edited, or suppressed elements—as sites of critical potential. By working with these absences, she creates speculative narratives that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and construction.

The essay presents Cibic’s engagement with the archive as an ongoing method: a way of analysing dominant narratives and exposing the ideological forces that sustain them, while opening space for alternative readings of history and its contemporary urgencies.

In his essay written for Jasmina Cibic’s solo presentation For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale, Tevž Logar frames the project as a complex, immersive installation that interrogates the relationship between art, architecture, and ideology. Cibic constructs “total works of art” that operate within and expose systems of power, revealing how cultural production is shaped by political structures and strategies of representation.

The project focuses on the mechanisms through which national identity is constructed and displayed. Through architectural interventions, film, and recontextualised artworks, Cibic transforms the Slovenian Pavilion into a staged environment that blurs the boundaries between public and private space, directing the viewer’s gaze and implicating them within systems of observation and control.

Key elements—including wallpaper depicting the ideologically charged beetle Anophthalmus hitleri, still-life paintings from the Slovenian parliament, and films based on archival political debates—highlight how aesthetic choices are never neutral but deeply entangled with ideological agendas. By reconstructing these historical and symbolic frameworks, the work exposes the processes through which nations select, frame, and legitimise cultural icons.

The project reveals art as part of the state’s ideological apparatus while simultaneously opening a space for critical reflection. It invites viewers to question how meaning is produced and to locate their own position within the structures that shape perception, suggesting both the inescapability of ideology and the possibility of its interrogation.

Ruby Beesley reads Jasmina Cibic’s work through the framework of the Venice Biennale, where national representation is both performed and scrutinised. Rather than attempting to sidestep this role, Cibic embraces its conditions, using the Pavilion itself as a site of inquiry into how states construct and circulate their image.

At the centre of Beesley’s analysis is For our Economy and Culture, where architectural references, state collections, and archival fragments are brought together to reveal how cultural symbols are selected, framed, and legitimised. What appears decorative—particularly in the use of floral imagery—is unpacked as ideologically charged, shaped by long-standing associations that position certain forms as neutral while masking their political function.

The film works expand this investigation by restaging historical debates and institutional processes, allowing past narratives to resonate within the present. These reconstructions blur distinctions between fact and fiction, pointing to the persistence of ideological structures embedded within cultural production.

Beesley highlights how Cibic’s practice turns attention toward the systems that organise visibility—those that determine what is preserved, displayed, or omitted—revealing national identity not as a fixed entity, but as an ongoing process of selection, repetition, and negotiation.

Written to accompany Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Nika Grabar’s essay Landscape Windows Wallpaper reflects on how architecture, language, and ideology shape the representation of the state across shifting historical contexts.

Grabar situates the project within the layered history of Villa Bled and the Slovenian parliament, tracing how a single site can pass through multiple political systems while retaining—and concealing—traces of each. Through this lens, architecture emerges not as a stable expression of ideology, but as a mutable framework that survives political change, continually reinterpreted through new narratives and uses.

The essay foregrounds the role of language as a political medium, drawing on archival transcripts of parliamentary debates to reveal how ideology is constructed through rhetoric as much as through built form. In contrast to the linguistic authority of socialist systems, Grabar reflects on contemporary capitalism’s displacement of language by numerical value, raising questions about whether art can operate beyond both regimes.

Central to the text is the archive as a site of reconstruction and contestation. By revisiting documents, images, and forgotten spaces, Cibic’s work reactivates suppressed or overlooked histories, exposing the tensions between official narratives and their material remains. Architecture, interiors, and landscapes are shown to be saturated with ideology, even when presented as neutral or decorative.

Grabar ultimately reads Cibic’s installation as a spatial and temporal reframing lens: the Slovenian Pavilion becomes a constructed interior where past political debates, architectural forms, and visual motifs are reassembled into a new narrative environment. Through this process, For Our Economy and Culture interrogates how nations are staged, remembered, and continually rewritten—inviting viewers to consider how present-day cultural production frames both history and the futures it imagines.

Written in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Jane Rendell’s essay Setting the Scene: For What Might Have Been approaches the work through the lens of “site-writing,” treating criticism itself as a situated, performative practice.

Rendell focuses on Cibic’s film set in the (now Slovene) government’s Villa Bled, where an imagined dialogue between architect Vinko Glanz and a journalist unfolds within the very architecture under discussion. She interprets the building not only as subject but as a “setting” that stages relationships between characters, viewer, and history—drawing on psychoanalytic concepts to describe how space frames experience, memory, and interpretation.

The essay positions Cibic’s work as operating between construction and deconstruction. While the film assembles archival material into a speculative narrative, it simultaneously unravels historical coherence, exposing the layered and unstable nature of memory. Rendell emphasizes that history here is not presented as a fixed sequence of events, but as something continually reinterpreted, re-scripted, and emotionally inflected.

Rendell frames Cibic’s installation as a complex interior—both spatial and psychological—where past and present, fact and fiction, are interwoven. In this setting, Cibic’s work does not simply reconstruct history, but opens it up, inviting the viewer to actively renegotiate its meanings and imagine alternative narratives of what might have been.