Instructions

Conceived for Cibic's solo exhibition Spielraum: The Nation Loves It at the Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2015, the series of live performances unfolded intermittently throughout the exhibition’s duration, activating the installation as a mutable stage for political rehearsal. Performers moved through the exhibition space seemingly engaged in acts of completion and maintenance: sewing curtains, rearranging sculptural seating, repositioning architectural fragments, carrying iron slogans, or painting texts directly onto walls. A looped choreography of labour, these gestures transformed the exhibition into a continuously shifting scenography in which the construction of ideology appeared as an unfinished and endlessly repeatable process.

The performances were structured around fragments of political speeches, architectural manifestos, and nation-building rhetoric drawn from across the twentieth century. These quotations — sourced from figures as ideologically disparate as Tito, Thatcher, Khrushchev, Mussolini, Prince Charles, Truman, and Hitler — were stripped from their original historical contexts and reassembled into looping dialogues and instructional exchanges. Phrases such as “Draw back the curtain of the future”, “Give expression to common desires”, “Do not try to satisfy the audience”, or “Find the artistic expression of our times” circulated between performers as both command and rehearsal.

Rather than illustrating political narratives directly, the performances exposed the mechanics through which political language becomes spatial, aesthetic, and behavioural form. Furniture derived from unrealised architectural plans for the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade was continuously rearranged by dancers, turning exhibition seating into choreographic notation systems or movable ideological structures. Curtains based on decorative elements from the former Palace of the Federation were sewn and manipulated in full view of the audience, blurring distinctions between backstage labour, theatrical display, and state spectacle. The exhibition itself became both stage and construction site: a theatre of soft power in perpetual assembly.

Throughout Spielraum, Cibic approaches architecture not as passive backdrop but as an active ideological actor. The performances extended this logic into the realm of the body, examining how political systems choreograph gesture, speech, movement, and public behaviour. The performers oscillated between worker, actor, decorator, citizen, and allegory, embodying the unstable relationship between participation and obedience within systems of representation. Their repetitive and ritualised actions suggested that nation-building is not a singular historical event, but a continuous process of aesthetic rehearsal sustained through repetition, maintenance, and collective performance.

The exclusively female cast further complicated the work’s relationship to political spectacle. Throughout Cibic’s films and installations, women repeatedly occupy the symbolic roles historically assigned to allegorical figures — Mother Nation, muse, ornament, or cultural caretaker — while simultaneously appropriating the authoritative language traditionally reserved for political leadership. In The Nation Loves It, the performers inhabit this contradiction directly: at once decorative and directive, subordinate and authoritative, silently labouring while voicing the ideological instructions through which states seek to construct collective identity.