The Gift

Ameli Klein’s text examines Jasmina Cibic’s work as a sustained investigation into the relationship between art, architecture, and ideology, focusing on how cultural production participates in systems of power. She frames Cibic’s practice as one that reveals the mechanisms through which nations construct and project identity—particularly through architecture, exhibition formats, and performative staging.

Klein emphasises Cibic’s use of historical material and reconstruction, noting how the artist reworks archives, fragments, and absent structures to expose the instability of official narratives. Rather than presenting history as fixed, Cibic’s works demonstrate how it is continuously rewritten through visual and spatial strategies.

A key thread in Klein’s analysis is the role of performance and display: bodies, buildings, and images are choreographed to articulate ideological positions, often masking underlying tensions between political ideals and their realities. Cibic’s work thus operates in a space between fiction and documentation, where constructed narratives reveal the artificiality of national myths.

Ultimately, Klein positions Cibic’s practice as a critical form of “world-making”—one that dissects the visual languages of power while proposing alternative ways of reading history, identity, and cultural representation.

In his essay, Vid Simoniti interprets Jasmina Cibic’s series The Arrangement as a contemporary reworking of the vanitas tradition, where beauty and decay become a lens through which to reflect on power and ideals.

He describes how Cibic constructs floral portraits of international institutions by inviting representatives of human rights organisations to nominate flowers, transforming decorative arrangements into symbolic representations of bodies such as the International Criminal Court or the UN Human Rights Council. This gesture extends Cibic’s ongoing interest in soft power, focusing on the aesthetic and symbolic tools through which political entities shape their image.

Simoniti contrasts the image-making strategies of nation states with those of international organisations, which must project neutrality rather than unity. He situates this within the broader tensions of international justice, noting its dependence on geopolitical power and the uneven enforcement of its principles.

Rather than presenting a purely critical view, the essay reads Cibic’s work as holding a more ambiguous position. Drawing on the historical symbolism of vanitas painting, the wilting flowers become a metaphor not only for fragility and impermanence but also for the precarious existence of ideals such as human rights.

Simoniti positions The Arrangement as a meditation on the limits and possibilities of these ideals—suspended between scepticism and hope, where the imagery invites reflection on what should be preserved, and why.

Art and Self-Determination: A Reader includes essays, poems and artistic responses to the theme of self-determination arising from a three-year research project funded by the Decade of Centenaries Programme. Taking as its starting point the centenary of the formation of the Irish Free State and the international movement towards self-determination post-World War One, this project focused on the role of art and artists against the backdrop of the changing map of Europe. Over three years, this project encompassed an international research conference, a summer school and reading group, a podcast IMMA Past Futures, artist commissions and a major exhibition, Self-Determination: A Global Perspective, October 2023–April 2024. Contributors to this publication – among them artists, scholars, researchers, historians, poets, activists and writers – were invited to reflect on the theme of self-determination from a range of perspectives across time and space.

In her essay titled A Flag, a Song, a Palace: Exploring the Scenography of Euorpes’s First Foray into Transnationalism, Jasmina Cibic reflects on the ways culture is deployed within moments of political transition, focusing on early experiments in transnational identity formation in Europe. Using the League of Nations as a key example, she traces how architecture, artistic commissions, and exhibition formats were mobilised to articulate and negotiate new political frameworks.

Rather than neutral expressions, these cultural forms are revealed as strategic tools—vehicles through which ideological positions are staged and communicated. From architectural proposals to symbolic and performative elements, aesthetic choices become central to the construction of collective narratives, while simultaneously exposing frictions between national interests and transnational aspirations.

Cibic’s essay maps recurring patterns in the use of culture as a method patriarchal verticals use throughout history, positioning artistic production as both embedded within and capable of critically unpacking these processes of political world-making.

In his essay The Archive as Strategy and Method in Jasmina Cibic’s Work, Matthieu Lelièvre examines how Cibic uses the archive as an active tool for questioning set grand narratives of political and national power.

Lelièvre describes Cibic’s practice as one that identifies highly specific historical “traces” and re-stages them within new scenographic contexts, also chosen with precision to allow for alternative world building thinking processes to emerge. Through this, she interrogates the reliability of sources and the mechanisms through which history is written, transmitted, and legitimised. Her work draws on extensive research and collaboration, assembling archives, architectural forms, performances, and texts into a total work that obsessively studies the relationship between art and political and national power.

The essay highlights how Cibic focuses not only on cultural objects but on the systems that produce and circulate them—such as political commissions, institutional frameworks, and cultural diplomacy. By reactivating moments such as performances, exhibitions, and architectural projects (including those linked to Cold War contexts and international exhibitions), she reveals how art always operates within state apparatuses and contributes to shaping collective identity.

Lelièvre also emphasises Cibic’s interest in the gaps and omissions within archives—the missing, edited, or suppressed elements—as sites of critical potential. By working with these absences, she creates speculative narratives that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and construction.

The essay presents Cibic’s engagement with the archive as an ongoing method: a way of analysing dominant narratives and exposing the ideological forces that sustain them, while opening space for alternative readings of history and its contemporary urgencies.

iLiana Fokianaki’s essay situates the Cibict’s work within a broader reflection on the shifting conditions of state power and its cultural manifestations.

The essay traces how the artist’s practice critically examines the evolution of political authority, from early 20th-century models of social welfare and soft power to contemporary forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on histories of architecture, culture, and political spectacle, Fokianaki highlights how art and cultural production have long functioned as instruments of persuasion, governance, and ideological framing.

Central to the analysis is Cibic’s film The Gift, which positions culture itself as a political tool—operating simultaneously as a vehicle of power and a site of critique. Through staged narratives, symbolic architectures, and archetypal figures, the work reveals how cultural forms contribute to the construction of national identity, diplomacy, and influence. These elements combine to form what Fokianaki describes as a “visual genealogy” of power, connecting historical strategies of representation to their contemporary expressions.

Fokianaki further interprets Cibic’s work as a practice that exposes the mechanisms through which power operates while maintaining a critical distance from them. In this reading, the artist’s engagement with culture becomes a means of examining how systems of representation are produced, circulated, and sustained.

The essay positions Cibic’s work as a critical lens through which to reconsider the role of culture in shaping political narratives, opening space for reflection on how these structures might be understood—and potentially reimagined.

In this interview with Chris Clarke, Cibic discusses her research-driven practice as an ongoing investigation into the relationship between culture and political power.

She reflects on her use of film as a narrative extension of installation, developing allegorical characters as archetypes that condense historical and political positions. These figures allow her to work with archival material while exposing the persistent similarities in political rhetoric across different regimes and time periods.

Cibic emphasises her interest in the construction and manipulation of archives, focusing on what is omitted, censored, or translated, and using these gaps to reimagine history through a feminist and critical lens. Across works such as The Gift, the NADA trilogy, and State of Illusion, she examines how art and architecture are instrumentalised, often revealing that the processes of selection, mediation, and censorship are more significant than the final cultural object itself.

Architecture plays a central role in her films, functioning not merely as a setting but as an active agent that choreographs action and embodies ideological histories. These sites—often former centres of political power—are approached as spaces of reenactment, where past and present narratives intersect.

Cibic also addresses the shifting role of culture today, arguing that traditional notions of soft power have been transformed under neoliberal conditions, where cultural production is increasingly tied to economic value and institutional survival. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, she positions her work as a platform for critical reflection, using humour, allegory, and repetition to expose the cyclical and often absurd dynamics of power, representation, and ideology.

This essay by Maja and Reuben Fowkes examines Jasmina Cibic’s film practice as a critical exploration of cultural diplomacy and the ideological role of art and architecture in shaping political identities. Focusing on works such as Fruits of Our Land, The Pavilion, the Nada trilogy, and The Gift, the authors show how Cibic constructs scripted debates performed by archetypal figures within historically charged architectural settings—to reveal how culture has been instrumentalised in moments of political crisis and international representation.

The text highlights how Cibic reactivates overlooked histories of modernism and re-stages past cultural conflicts to expose recurring tensions between artistic autonomy and state agendas, particularly around how nations present themselves on the global stage. Across her films, architecture becomes an active agent, while dialogue—assembled from historical speeches and cultural discourse—unfolds as a performative negotiation of ideology, memory, and power. The essay ultimately positions Cibic’s work as a form of critical “Trojan horse,” reintroducing the emancipatory, transnational, and feminist potentials of socialist modernity as an alternative to contemporary capitalist and nationalist frameworks.