Fruits of Our Land

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.

This essay by Maja and Reuben Fowkes examines Jasmina Cibic’s film practice as a critical exploration of cultural diplomacy and the ideological role of art and architecture in shaping political identities. Focusing on works such as Fruits of Our Land, The Pavilion, the Nada trilogy, and The Gift, the authors show how Cibic constructs scripted debates performed by archetypal figures within historically charged architectural settings—to reveal how culture has been instrumentalised in moments of political crisis and international representation.

The text highlights how Cibic reactivates overlooked histories of modernism and re-stages past cultural conflicts to expose recurring tensions between artistic autonomy and state agendas, particularly around how nations present themselves on the global stage. Across her films, architecture becomes an active agent, while dialogue—assembled from historical speeches and cultural discourse—unfolds as a performative negotiation of ideology, memory, and power. The essay ultimately positions Cibic’s work as a form of critical “Trojan horse,” reintroducing the emancipatory, transnational, and feminist potentials of socialist modernity as an alternative to contemporary capitalist and nationalist frameworks.

Gordana Nikolić’s essay approaches The Pavilion through the lens of spectacle. Writing in relation to Cibic’s earlier projects, she situates the work within a broader inquiry into the visual languages through which political power stages itself.

Her focus rests on the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition—a building that once embodied the ambition of a modern, outward-looking state, yet has largely disappeared from dominant historical narratives. For Nikolić, this absence is telling: it reveals how certain forms of modernism are canonised while others, particularly those emerging from the periphery, are marginalised or forgotten.

Cibic’s reconstruction of the pavilion becomes, in this reading, less an act of recovery than a critical intervention into how history is assembled. Nikolić underscores the artist’s attention to the seductive qualities of modernist aesthetics—their capacity to persuade, to conceal, and to operate as tools of cultural diplomacy. Through comparative references and archival substitutions, Cibic exposes how these visual strategies circulate across different ideological contexts, producing a shared language of power.

At the centre of the installation, the act of building is performed by a group of women, a gesture Nikolić reads as a deliberate disruption of the masculinist frameworks that have historically underpinned both architecture and state formation. The theatrical staging further distances the work from any claim to documentary truth, instead foregrounding the processes through which narratives are constructed, rehearsed, and maintained.

Nikolić ultimately positions The Pavilion as a re-staging of a historical spectacle that reveals its own mechanisms, opening a space to reconsider how national identity is fabricated, remembered, and continuously rewritten.

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 in the context of Jasmina Cibic’s project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennial, Lina Džuverović’s essay On the Impossibility and Inevitability of Representation examines the tensions between cultural production and national representation through the lens of “soft power.”

The text frames culture as a key instrument through which nations construct and project their image internationally, often transforming complex social realities into simplified, marketable myths. Džuverović argues that artists and cultural producers are inevitably entangled in this process: even when critical of national agendas, their participation in exhibitions, funding structures, and international platforms contributes to the shaping of a nation’s symbolic identity.

Central to the essay is the paradox of representation—simultaneously impossible and unavoidable. While no artwork can fully embody a national identity, the structures of global cultural exchange, particularly events such as the Venice Biennial, continuously demand such representation. This creates a condition in which artists must navigate complicity and resistance, operating within systems they may seek to critique.

Through Cibic’s work, Džuverović highlights how this paradox can be exposed rather than resolved. By reenacting archival debates surrounding the selection of artworks for the Slovenian parliament at the time of its construction in 1957, the project reveals the mechanisms through which national iconography is continuously constructed and negotiated—reappearing through strikingly similar tactics across successive ideological frameworks.

The essay positions Cibic’s approach as a form of critical over-identification: by fully inhabiting the role of national representative, the work lays bare the structures of cultural myth-making, exposing the ideological frameworks that continue to shape how nations are staged and perceived.