Mothers

The video installation Mothers (2025) was developed in dialogue with the archive of the Gallery of the Non-Aligned—the only institution dedicated to artworks gifted by heads of state, diplomats, and cultural elites of the Non-Aligned Movement. Formed during the Cold War as an alternative to the binary logic of East and West, the Movement proposed a third position grounded in solidarity among newly decolonised nations and the pursuit of cultural, political, and economic autonomy. Within this framework, art operated not simply as soft power, but as a diplomatic language—a symbolic articulation of sovereignty and alliance.

From this archive, Cibic isolates sculptures of female heads, busts, and figures—allegorical embodiments of self-defining “mother nations”: forms that stage ideals of origin, care, and continuity, while simultaneously exposing the gendered construction of national identity. The nations they represent—shaped by colonial legacies and Cold War geopolitics—have had their cultural narratives repeatedly obscured, exoticised, or dismantled through dominant Western frameworks.

In Mothers, the sculptures are bound within a sequence of detonations, their idealised surfaces ruptured into signals of ancestral urgency—a dispersed, matriarchal warning system that cuts across geographies and temporalities. Slowly rotating and lit like precious commodities in a display case, the figures foreground their own objectification and the commodification of identity. As fractures proliferate, the bodies disintegrate into dust, oscillating between loss and persistence, erasure and afterlife.

The soundscape layers ASMR-like textures—amplifying the uneasy pleasure of watching destruction—with the voice of a female narrator articulating fragments of resistance and survival. These are drawn from archival debates on cultural sovereignty within the Movement, where art functioned as a frontline of ideological struggle. Here, Cibic reframes the legacy of Non-Alignment as a feminist proposition—one in which care, vulnerability, and refusal operate as forms of geopolitical agency.