The Making of Nations

Cibic created this sculpture as the first object encountered upon entering her solo exhibition Most Favoured Nation at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. The work takes the form of a veterinary speculum used in the artificial insemination of horses, engraved with the words The Making of Nations. The object extends Cibic’s long-term fascination with the Lipizzaner horse as a living instrument of cultural diplomacy — a breed developed at the Lipica Stud Farm in present-day Slovenia for the Habsburg imperial court and later transformed into a contested symbol of national heritage and prestige across Central Europe.

Balancing between medical apparatus, ritual object and political allegory, the sculpture foregrounds the mechanisms through which culture is bred, managed and instrumentalised. Referencing the Lipizzaner’s role as both national symbol and diplomatic gift, the work draws parallels between biological reproduction and the fabrication of political narratives. Here, the language of care and cultivation becomes inseparable from systems of control, exposing how art and culture are repeatedly mobilised to aestheticise political contradictions and rehabilitate damaged state identities.

Installed as a threshold object, the work functions simultaneously as invitation and warning: an emblem of how nations reproduce themselves through spectacle, myth-making and the disciplined choreography of cultural representation.