Nada

The collage series emerges from a study of the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels, and the materials, spatial strategies, and cultural narratives that underpinned its construction. This was the first World Fair after WWII and, as such, the first postwar arena in which nations repositioned themselves ideologically and politically before an international audience. Developed through archival research into the pavilion’s architect, Vjenceslav Richter—particularly his diaries and records of sourcing materials—the works draw a connection between the designed surface of the pavilion and the carefully selected, choreographed bodies that came to represent the nation abroad.

Central to the collages is a female figure costumed after the original Yugoslav staging of The Miraculous Mandarin, the ballet chosen as the key artwork to represent Yugoslavia in Brussels. Her body performs a sequence of poses derived from art-historical allegories of female nationhood. Through these figures, Cibic exposes the psychological mechanisms through which power is staged and sustained, revealing how the image of the feminine is mobilised in the production of political spectacle.

As the figure shifts between flag bearers, healers, and embodiments of the motherland—always serving the patriarchal construction of national identity—her attributes are displaced. Rather than carrying symbolic objects delineating specific representational regimes and power (books, swords, flags), the figure is intersected with and contained within abstract geometric forms derived from the ballet’s scenography.

These geometric intrusions reframe the body as both surface and structure—at once performer and site. The cuts within the collages expose fragments of linoleum, referencing the material selected for the pavilion floor: a gesture that collapses the distinction between stage and architecture, positioning the pavilion itself as a choreographic device—a space where cultural diplomacy unfolds through carefully staged movements, images, and bodies.

In these works, the female figure becomes both agent and substrate of representation, caught within overlapping regimes of display—dance, architecture, and nationhood—where the performance of identity is inseparable from the surfaces upon which it is enacted.