The Miraculous Mandarin

The series of copper photographs presents the central protagonists from Jasmina Cibic’s film NADA Act II (2017), which examines European modernism as a tool of political staging and explores the choreography of power through the disciplined body—how gesture, posture, and movement become instruments of national ideology. Reconstructing the largely undocumented Expo 1958 staging of The Miraculous Mandarin, the film reimagines its narrative as political allegory, in which the female body operates simultaneously as spectacle and site of control.

The ballet Cibic retraces was originally conceived for Expo 58—the first World Exposition after World War II—staged as a global arena where nations sought to reposition themselves in the aftermath of trauma. Through architecture, art, music, and dance, participating states constructed carefully calibrated visual programmes to signal new ideological directions. Within this context, Yugoslavia’s selection of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin—a narrative centred on a prostitute coerced into luring and entrapping clients—becomes a pointed and ambivalent gesture. Cibic foregrounds this choice as a tongue-in-cheek reflection on cultural production in the service of the state, exposing the uneasy complicity between artistic actors and their political commissioners.

Rendered in Cibic’s recognisable mode of film portraiture, the figures appear as allegorical types rather than psychological individuals. Their poses—drawn from the ballet’s reconstructed choreography and the canon of European nationalist iconography—are held, repeated, and formalised, emphasising the body as a site of inscription. Mother Nation oscillates between seduction and rigidity; the Architect between desire and control; the Politicians between observation and manipulation.

Stripped of narrative progression, these portraits expose the mechanics of staging itself. Gesture becomes emblem, costume becomes code, and the body is fixed within a visual regime that echoes both cinematic stills and official state imagery. In this arrested state, Cibic’s characters emerge not as agents, but as carriers of ideology—figures continuously posed into coherence by the forces they appear to embody.