The Spirit of Our Needs

Originally created for Cibic’s solo exhibition The Spirit of Our Needs at Museum Haus Esters, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the curtain installation emerged from the artist’s wider investigation into the relationship between modernist architecture, political representation, and the staging of cultural authority. Developed in dialogue with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Esters and Haus Lange — villas commissioned by the silk manufacturers Hermann Lange and Josef Esters in the late 1920s — the project examined how modern architecture functioned simultaneously as domestic environment, exhibition device, and instrument of soft power.

For Cibic, the Krefeld context became a way of tracing the intertwined histories of private capital, national representation, and aesthetic ideology. Mies van der Rohe’s architectural language — later instrumentalised within Germany’s exhibition pavilions and trade fair architecture — served as a key point of departure for exploring how modernism constructed visual regimes of authority while presenting itself as neutral, universal, and free from ornament.

Within the installation, the curtain became the project’s central formal and conceptual device. Stretching across the rooms of Haus Esters like a continuous skin, it transformed the architecture into a theatrical environment while simultaneously drawing attention to the mechanisms of framing embedded within Mies van der Rohe’s work. The piece directly references Mies and Lilly Reich’s Café Samt & Seide (Velvet and Silk Café) from 1927, where textile surfaces were used to choreograph movement, visibility, and spatial perception within exhibition architecture. Cibic reactivates this strategy in order to scrutinise the ideological function of display itself: how architecture directs the gaze, produces desire, and stages political or cultural legitimacy.

The curtain’s printed surface combines reconstructed fragments of murals by Johan Thorn-Prikker and Heinrich Campendonk, historically connected to Krefeld and later concealed or marginalised through changing ideological and aesthetic regimes. Here, what was once hidden becomes a new device for concealment. The curtain both reveals and obscures: simultaneously framing views, softening architectural boundaries, and interrupting the modernist fantasy of transparency and purity.

By introducing a dense ornamental skin into Mies’s rigorously controlled interiors, Cibic deliberately destabilises the modernist rejection of decoration. Instead, she exposes how material surfaces — marble, silk, wood, velvet — always already operated ideologically within modern architecture, despite claims of neutrality. The textile becomes a carrier of historical memory, industrial ambition, and aesthetic propaganda, linking the Krefeld silk industry to broader histories of exhibition design and national self-fashioning.