Mother Nations

The series is ongoing and develops in parallel with Jasmina Cibic’s larger research-led projects and films. As she reconstructs and reanimates archival political texts through allegorical protagonists within her moving-image works, she simultaneously revisits female sculptural forms once burdened with representing national identity, political ideology, cultural aspiration, or private capital. These works function as historical ready-mades: sculptural remnants recovered from architectures and exhibitions of power, then reconstructed, fragmented, or merged into new forms.

For The Land of Plenty, Cibic reconstructed a lost female sculpture that originally adorned the Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, working from scarce photographic documentation. Carrying a bowl of fruit, the figure embodied the rhetoric of abundance, hospitality, and prosperity central to exhibitionary nation-building and the performance of soft power.

A second body of works Ornaments of Power emerged from Cibic’s project The Spirit of Our Needs at Kunstmuseen Krefeld – Haus Esters, originally commissioned by the silk manufacturers and collectors Hermann Lange and Josef Esters from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The success of these villas would lead directly to Mies’s commission for the German Pavilion at the same 1929 Barcelona Exposition. Here Cibic revisits the role of the female nude within modernist architecture and systems of representation, merging replicas of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Torso of the Kneeling Woman — displayed within the feminised private interior of Haus Lange — with Georg Kolbe’s Der Morgen, the iconic nude positioned at the centre of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. Through this morphing of forms, Cibic draws a conceptual line between private patronage and national representation, both staged through idealised and eroticised female bodies. In doing so, the works interrogate how national languages of aesthetics are constructed, who authors them, and who is granted visibility within these systems of representation.

Throughout the early twentieth century, female nudes were repeatedly positioned within pavilion architecture and state-sponsored exhibition design as allegorical companions to national representation. They softened the rhetoric of power through beauty, sensuality, and ornament, while remaining mute symbolic vessels onto which political aspirations could be projected. Their bodies carried the burden of representing harmony, civilisation, progress, or prosperity, yet they remained voiceless within the ideological systems they were enlisted to serve.

Cibic carries these historical remnants into the casting processes of her films, where such allegorical figures reappear as active presences rather than passive objects. In works such as the Nada trilogy, female protagonists — Germania, Mother Nation, the Artist, the Curator — become sirens of urgency: figures through which political rhetoric, desire, seduction, and authority are performed, contested, and destabilised. Across the series, Cibic approaches history as a palimpsest in which architecture, sculpture, ideology, and gender continually overlap, revealing how political power has persistently aestheticised itself through mute female forms.