Mythmaking as Colonisation Tactic

Mythmaking as a Colonisation Tactic was conceived as a site-specific installation for Jasmina Cibic’s solo exhibition at the Tobacco Museum in Ljubljana. The work brings together posters of picturesque landscapes—borrowed from the visual language of tourism—with drawings based on found photographs of hunters posing with their trophies. These composite images align two regimes of extraction: landscape as projection, and capture as proof.

The landscape posters echo imagery used in Yugoslav bunkers constructed for state elites, where idealised vistas substituted direct access to the outside world. The figure of the hunter recalls Josip Broz Tito’s cultivation of hunting culture and the accumulation of live animals. On the Brioni Islands, controlled hunting grounds coexisted with a diplomatic menagerie, where exotic animals—circulated as gifts from leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement—were staged as signs of geopolitical alignment. These environments functioned as theatres of hospitality, where capture, display, and diplomacy converged.

Cibic adopts and reconfigures these visual regimes to expose their underlying logic: the image as souvenir, as evidence that an encounter—already mediated and codified—has taken place. The drawings, derived from found photographs, position the artist within an existing economy of images and experiences, operating less as author than as an illustrator of enacted difference.

Within this framework, the roles of tourist, hunter, and spectator collapse into one another, each implicated in the transformation of place into image and experience into value. The work reflects on the position of the artist within a geopolitical field in which cultural production is conditioned by expectations of difference. Here, authorship is caught in a structural tension between critical agency and the demand to produce legible forms of otherness. Mythmaking as a Colonisation Tactic renders this tension visible, framing the artwork as both a site of critique and a calibrated offering—supplying images that sustain the viewer’s desire for the geopolitical exotic while simultaneously exposing its construction.