The Pleasure of Exchange

The Pleasure of Exchange is a performative installation developed within Jasmina Cibic’s broader research project and film The Gift, which examines the relationship between political spectacle, the gifting of culture, and the historical exclusion of women from the symbolic construction of twentieth-century ideological projects. The title alludes to anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s writings on gift exchange and the social obligations embedded within acts of giving, while “the pleasure of expense” references the ceremonial excess through which power, prestige, and ideological alliances are publicly staged. Combining sculptural installation, live vocal performance, and sound, the work transforms the exhibition space into a ceremonial environment in which diplomacy, architecture, and the female body become entangled within the performative language of state power.

At the centre of the installation are suspended metal structures supporting embroidered fabric hammocks inscribed with political slogans drawn from speeches, declarations, and cultural policies associated with moments of geopolitical transformation and crisis. Reclining within these suspended forms, an all-female vocal ensemble performs a composition developed in collaboration with composer and vocalist Barbara Kinga Majewska. The libretto assembles fragments of archival political rhetoric surrounding culture, solidarity, and international cooperation—texts historically authored, institutionalised, and circulated within overwhelmingly patriarchal political systems.

The composition is built around fragments of Allgemeiner Völkerversöhnungs-Marsch op. 11 by Franz Brabes, a musical score donated to the League of Nations and discovered by Cibic during research at the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva. Reanimated through the female voice, the archival material is transformed from a historical gesture of diplomatic idealism into a speculative choral response to the ideological uses of art and culture throughout the twentieth century.

Suspended between rest, ritual, and display, the performers inhabit the installation as both subjects and scenographic elements, exposing the proximity between the instrumentalisation of culture and the instrumentalisation of the female body within political representation. The hammocks—objects associated with leisure, retreat, and vulnerability—become temporary stages for a collective voice historically excluded from the authorship of nation-building and international diplomacy.

Through its fusion of operatic spectacle, political rhetoric, and sculptural choreography, The Pleasure of Exchange reflects on the role of art and architecture as tools through which states imagine solidarity, negotiate ideological identity, and aestheticise political power. Simultaneously, the work proposes the female voice as a site through which these inherited narratives may be re-performed, interrupted, and collectively rewritten.