Speculative Landscapes

2023

A study on framing monumentality.

Speculative Landscapes returns to a body of archival material first encountered in the artist’s 2015 collage series Instructions, developed here for an exhibition at MSU Zagreb focused on political gifting within the exchanges of the Non-Aligned Movement and former Yugoslavia. The series draws from photographic albums presented to Josip Broz Tito—images produced to accompany diplomatic visits and record encounters between states.

Within this material, Cibic focuses on landscape views—images in which political actors are notably absent. Rather than neutral backdrops, these scenes begin to read as carefully composed environments, shaped to host and frame moments of political exchange.

In this series, the artist moves beyond collage into a more explicitly sculptural intervention. Through precise cuts and the addition of extruded forms, the photographs are physically expanded, pushing elements of the image into three-dimensional space. These protrusions echo the formal language of Yugoslav modernism, reintroducing framing structures directly into the opulent landscape—a nod to the memorial architecture that former Yugoslavia was erecting as a nation-binding strategy.

Speculative Landscapes is a study of the construction of a national landscape and its framing through architectural devices—as a gifting strategy by the state to a federation of nations still in the process of becoming.