The Pavilion

In this extensive interview with architect and writer Miloš Kosec, Jasmina Cibic reflects on the central methodologies and political questions underpinning her artistic practice, focusing on the relationship between architecture, ideology, representation, and the instrumentalisation of culture as a form of soft power. The conversation traces the development of Cibic’s projects from For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale through Spielraum and NADA, situating her work within broader discussions surrounding Yugoslav modernism, transnationalism, feminist critique, and the aesthetics of political authority.

Cibic describes her practice as a form of “a double game,” in which she adopts and reenacts the visual languages of ideology in order to expose the mechanisms through which political systems aestheticise and legitimise themselves. Through highly constructed installations, films, performances, and archival reconstructions, she examines architecture and art not as neutral cultural forms, but as scenographic instruments through which states stage identity, consensus, and authority.

A major focus of the interview is the legacy of Yugoslav architecture and the Non-Aligned Movement. Cibic discusses her interest in the ways architecture functioned as a tool for constructing a new political language during the formation of socialist Yugoslavia and the emergence of the “third path” of non-alignment. Rather than approaching Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, she positions it as a completed ideological project that allows for a forensic reading of the relationship between aesthetics and political power.

The conversation also addresses Cibic’s engagement with overlooked architects and historical figures such as Vinko Glanz, Dragiša Brašovan, and Adolf Loos, as well as her interest in forgotten narratives, secondary actors, and the feminist shadows of dominant architectural histories. She reflects critically on contemporary forms of cultural production, discussing the changing political role of artists, the transformation of institutions, the limits of participatory art, and the increasing precarity of interdisciplinary practice within contemporary capitalism.

Throughout the interview, Cibic emphasises her interest in the “soft power” of art and architecture — the ways cultural forms frame, seduce, and naturalise authority while concealing ideological structures beneath aesthetics, ornament, and spectacle. Her projects, she argues, deliberately resist singular interpretation, functioning instead as complex theatrical environments in which audiences encounter the unstable mechanisms through which political realities are constructed and performed.

This essay by Maja and Reuben Fowkes examines Jasmina Cibic’s film practice as a critical exploration of cultural diplomacy and the ideological role of art and architecture in shaping political identities. Focusing on works such as Fruits of Our Land, The Pavilion, the Nada trilogy, and The Gift, the authors show how Cibic constructs scripted debates performed by archetypal figures within historically charged architectural settings—to reveal how culture has been instrumentalised in moments of political crisis and international representation.

The text highlights how Cibic reactivates overlooked histories of modernism and re-stages past cultural conflicts to expose recurring tensions between artistic autonomy and state agendas, particularly around how nations present themselves on the global stage. Across her films, architecture becomes an active agent, while dialogue—assembled from historical speeches and cultural discourse—unfolds as a performative negotiation of ideology, memory, and power. The essay ultimately positions Cibic’s work as a form of critical “Trojan horse,” reintroducing the emancipatory, transnational, and feminist potentials of socialist modernity as an alternative to contemporary capitalist and nationalist frameworks.

Gordana Nikolić’s essay approaches The Pavilion through the lens of spectacle. Writing in relation to Cibic’s earlier projects, she situates the work within a broader inquiry into the visual languages through which political power stages itself.

Her focus rests on the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition—a building that once embodied the ambition of a modern, outward-looking state, yet has largely disappeared from dominant historical narratives. For Nikolić, this absence is telling: it reveals how certain forms of modernism are canonised while others, particularly those emerging from the periphery, are marginalised or forgotten.

Cibic’s reconstruction of the pavilion becomes, in this reading, less an act of recovery than a critical intervention into how history is assembled. Nikolić underscores the artist’s attention to the seductive qualities of modernist aesthetics—their capacity to persuade, to conceal, and to operate as tools of cultural diplomacy. Through comparative references and archival substitutions, Cibic exposes how these visual strategies circulate across different ideological contexts, producing a shared language of power.

At the centre of the installation, the act of building is performed by a group of women, a gesture Nikolić reads as a deliberate disruption of the masculinist frameworks that have historically underpinned both architecture and state formation. The theatrical staging further distances the work from any claim to documentary truth, instead foregrounding the processes through which narratives are constructed, rehearsed, and maintained.

Nikolić ultimately positions The Pavilion as a re-staging of a historical spectacle that reveals its own mechanisms, opening a space to reconsider how national identity is fabricated, remembered, and continuously rewritten.