Nada: The Exhibition

The photographic series presents three portraits of the protagonists from Jasmina Cibic’s film NADA Act III: The Exhibition, filmed on the premises of Haus Lange and Haus Esters. The Artist, the Curator, and Germania appear in the dubious tradition of the allegorical female, each carrying sculptural objects derived from theatrical productions at world expositions, reconfigured here as musical instruments. As with the walls behind them, their bodies are overlaid with the exhibition’s visual leitmotif of the curtain—like a tattooed skin of ideological belonging. The domestic interior designed to display art and the female body staged to represent the nation converge in a double register of muted political speech.

NADA Act III: The Exhibition forms the third chapter in Cibic’s NADA (Hope) trilogy, which investigates European modernisms as instruments of patriarchal power and political staging. The film focuses on three key world expositions—Barcelona (1929), Paris (1937), and Brussels (1958)—corresponding to three distinct political formations of Germany: Weimar, Nazi, and post-war democratic. Drawing on archival records of German political debates surrounding the selection of architects and artists for these exhibitions, the script reveals how aesthetic decisions were mobilised to secure international approval, exposing visual culture as a primary vehicle for ideological positioning.

Within this framework, the three protagonists emerge as temporal and ideological doubles, inhabiting parallel roles shaped by histories that excluded their authorship. Their voices—assembled from archives of institutional deliberation and public discourse—underscore the absence of female agency within these processes, even as their bodies become the carriers of its rhetoric.

The photographic series extends the film’s enquiry into the gendered politics of representation, positioning the female figure as both surface and agent—inscribed by ideological histories while destabilising the narratives she is made to embody.