Her Barbaric Luxury

Since For Our Economy and Culture, the project with which Jasmina Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale, the artist has repeatedly employed forged iron within her installations as both material and political signifier. In Cibic’s work, iron functions not merely as sculptural structure, but as a carrier of intertwined histories of labour, architecture, ornament and state formation.

Her Barbaric Luxury extends this investigation through a material lineage connected to the regions of present-day Slovenia from which the artist’s grandparents originated — territories historically shaped by ironworking traditions within the Habsburg Empire. Drawing on family histories from the area surrounding Kropa, a village long associated with iron forging and metal craft, Cibic recalls her great grandmother's story of iron being collected from surface landscapes and carried into local workshops that supplied wider imperial markets. Forged iron thus appears in the work not only as sculptural material, but as a carrier of labour, inheritance and the circulation of aesthetic and political value across shifting regimes.

Playing with the relationship between architectural style and political branding, the artist inhabits typographies and ornamental languages drawn from architectural projects whose role was to announce moments of ideological and national transformation. The work’s title appropriates a phrase used by the early twentieth-century press to describe the supposed geopolitical exoticism of non-Western female performers and artists entering Western cultural space. In Cibic’s hands, the phrase becomes a critique of the colonial and patriarchal gaze through which women were aestheticised, disciplined and consumed as spectacles of difference.

Central to this inquiry is Adolf Loos’ unrealised design for Josephine Baker’s Paris house, conceived around a swimming pool visible from an adjoining salon where male guests could observe her body while remaining unseen themselves. The modernist interior thus became both stage and surveillance apparatus — an architecture of desire structured through asymmetries of gender, race and power.

Balancing between architectural fragment, political slogan and ornamental device, Her Barbaric Luxury exposes how systems of representation are repeatedly forged through the convergence of material extraction, cultural projection and the choreography of viewing, revealing how the perpetual staging of difference remains intrinsic to both the patriarchal gaze and the economies of desire through which capital sustains itself.