Other Mythologies

Other Mythologies brings together and reconfigures two of Jasmina Cibic’s earlier projects—Dictionary of Imaginary Places and In the Gorges—within the specific architectural and historical context of Maribor Art Gallery. Installed in a former monastic church, the work engages directly with the building’s 19th-century frescoes, which depict imagined Austro-Hungarian battles that never occurred. These paintings already blur fact and fiction, offering a historical precedent for the construction of national mythologies through visual representation.

Cibic extends this logic into a contemporary setting by transforming the gallery into a simulated transit space. At its centre is a large-scale video projection of Ljubljana Airport’s departures/arrivals board, altered to display fictional destinations drawn from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places—a compendium of invented locations from world literature. Surrounding this are tiled surfaces bearing drawings of imaginary Balkan landscapes, produced in collaboration with a former police sketch artist and based on Karl May’s In the Gorges of the Balkans.

Originally realised as an intervention at Brnik Airport, Dictionary of Imaginary Places replaced real flight destinations with fictional ones without informing passengers, momentarily disrupting the authority of the airport as a system of factual information. By inserting imaginary geographies into a highly regulated space, the work exposed the extent to which travel is shaped as much by desire and projection as by logistics.

Re-staged within the gallery, these elements create a layered environment where historical myth-making, bureaucratic systems, and contemporary forms of mobility intersect. The installation foregrounds how images—whether in frescoes, literature, or information systems—construct shared realities, revealing the unstable boundary between fact and fiction in the formation of cultural and national narratives.