Show the Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured

Show the Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured is a performative installation that examines how political landscapes are staged, narrated, and sustained through the intertwined languages of image-making, architecture, and performance. At its centre is a monumental wallpaper panorama composed from archival photographs commissioned by former Yugoslavia’s president Josip Broz Tito and produced by his official state photographers to portray the emerging postwar identity of socialist Yugoslavia. Originally circulated as diplomatic gifts in the form of photobooks presented by president Tito to visiting political leaders and international delegations, the images documented landscapes that functioned as carefully staged backdrops for performances of political unity, progress, and transnational alliance. Reassembled by Cibic into a single continuous terrain, these sites collapse into an imagined geography of ideological projection and collective aspiration.

Across this constructed landscape unfold banners carrying fragments of political speeches on nation-building, development, and collective futures sourced from various contexts of mid 20th century worldbuilding projects. During live activations of the work, young female artists gradually inscribe these slogans in gold paint, enacting the labour through which political myths are aestheticised and maintained. Their gestures transform the installation into a choreography of authorship and repetition, foregrounding the historical absence of women from the political and visual construction of national identity, while simultaneously positioning them as agents rewriting its symbolic language.

The installation often incorporates sculptural forms derived from modernist architectural plans developed for Belgrade during preparations for the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. These elements frame the exhibition as a speculative stage in which viewers encounter the spatial and rhetorical mechanisms through which alternative models of international belonging were imagined during the Cold War.

By bringing together archival imagery, performative action, and political rhetoric, Show the Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured reflects on the role of artists, architects, and cultural producers as scenographers of collective identity. The work asks who is permitted to construct the visual and ideological landscapes through which societies imagine themselves, and what forms of exclusion are embedded within these projections of progress, solidarity, and shared futures.