Power Verticals

In Power Verticals, Jasmina Cibic reconstructs fragments of the visual language through which twentieth-century states performed themselves on the international stage. The installation draws on the architecture of the Yugoslav national pavilions presented at the World Expositions in Barcelona (1929), Paris (1937) and Brussels (1958) — historical moments in which architecture became a diplomatic instrument for announcing ideological transformation, modernity and geopolitical ambition.

At the centre of the installation stand three bronze sculptural forms derived from the vertical architectural elements that marked the entrances to these pavilions. Each corresponds to a distinct political moment: the pre-war optimism and monarchic self-fashioning of Barcelona in 1929; the ideologically charged atmosphere of the 1937 Paris Exposition staged in the shadow of rising fascism and Nazism; and the Brussels Expo of 1958, the first major World Exposition after the Second World War, where new geopolitical alliances and post-war futures were performed through the universal language of modernism.

Although formally distinct — moving from figuration to abstraction — each structure operated as a symbolic marker of a newly declared political identity. One work revisits the classical female figure placed before the Yugoslav pavilion in Barcelona in 1929, where the allegorical “Mother of the Nation” embodied fertility, prosperity and territorial abundance. In contrast, the later pavilion structures increasingly abandoned figurative language in favour of the purified abstraction of socialist modernism, signalling a shift from nationalist classicism toward the rhetoric of international progress and non-aligned futurity.

Surrounding the sculptures, a monumental curtain introduces another layer of architectural citation. Its surface incorporates a floor pattern derived from a Yugoslav modernist interior, transforming a decorative motif into a theatrical backdrop. As throughout Cibic’s practice, ornament becomes political language: a scenographic device through which ideology is made spatial, seductive and emotionally legible. Embedded within the installation are fragments of political phraseology repeatedly invoked throughout the artist’s work — slogans, declarations and rhetorical constructions through which states narrate themselves into existence.

Rather than reconstructing these historical forms nostalgically, Cibic stages them as unstable symbols within a shifting choreography of power. Read together, the bronzes and curtain reveal how political systems continuously redesign their aesthetic surfaces while reproducing enduring structures of representation, spectatorship and patriarchal authority. The pavilion emerges not simply as architecture, but as an apparatus of persuasion — a stage upon which nations rehearse visions of themselves for both domestic and international audiences.