The Nation Loves It

The textile work originates from Jasmina Cibic’s research project Spielraum: The Nation Loves It and premiered at the Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2015. The large-scale curtain installation forms part of an ongoing body of textile works examining the ideological function of decorative surfaces within architectures of political representation. The work draws directly from The Forest, a monumental tapestry designed by Vojo Dimitrijević and Branko Subotić-Sube for the former Bosnian Salon in the Palace of the Federation in Belgrade — the ceremonial seat of socialist Yugoslavia and host to the inaugural conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.

Rather than reproducing the tapestry as historical quotation, Cibic isolates and reconfigures its formal vocabulary into an enlarged textile environment that oscillates between scenography, architectural skin, and ideological backdrop. Originally conceived to embody the symbolic unity of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics through decorative modernism, the Bosnian Salon tapestry functioned as part of a larger representational apparatus in which art, interior design, and architecture collectively staged the political identity of the new socialist federation. Cibic extracts this visual language from its original context and reanimates it within the exhibition space as a performative surface.

Stretching across the gallery like a theatrical curtain, the work transforms architecture into stage set. The curtain simultaneously conceals and frames, directing movement and controlling visibility while exposing the mechanics of display itself. In doing so, Cibic brings under scrutiny the ways political systems aestheticise themselves through ornament, decoration, and carefully choreographed interiors. The textile surface becomes an instrument of soft power: a material through which ideology is rendered seductive, atmospheric, and emotionally legible.

Within Spielraum, the curtain also functioned as an active element within a series of performances and films, where performers moved behind, between, and against its folds while reciting fragmented political speeches drawn from twentieth-century nation-building rhetoric. The curtain therefore operated not merely as backdrop but as a mutable ideological actor — a skin through which political narratives were rehearsed, staged, and destabilised.

Cibic’s reworking of the tapestry further reflects her broader interest in how modernist aesthetics were mobilised within the construction of post-war political identities. The decorative language of the original Bosnian tapestry — abstracted, geometric, monumental — belonged to Yugoslavia’s attempt to formulate a new visual identity distinct from both Soviet Socialist Realism and Western capitalist spectacle. By reconstructing and displacing this language, Cibic exposes the instability of political symbolism once detached from the ideological systems that originally produced it.

Across the work, textile becomes both archive and performance: a material carrier of political memory whose ornamental surface conceals histories of diplomacy, statecraft, and cultural engineering. Suspended between historical reconstruction and contemporary scenography, the curtain reveals how decoration itself functions politically — not as peripheral embellishment, but as an active mechanism through which power frames collective imagination.