The State of illusion

A series of portraits focuses on the central protagonist from Jasmina Cibic’s film The State of Illusion (2018), which re-stages Yugoslavia’s final presentation at a Universal World Exposition (Expo 67, Montreal) as a theatrical illusionist device.

Set within an empty stage, the film transforms the pavilion’s modular architecture into a machine for disappearance, within which a female magician—both author and subject of the act—repeatedly vanishes through a sequence of escalating illusions, each standing in for one of the six Yugoslav republics, until her body disappears entirely, echoing the dissolution of the state.

The photographic series isolates this central figure, presenting the magician in a sequence of staged portraits in which she holds flags bearing phrases drawn from political speeches delivered during moments of populist and nationalist ascent. Suspended between performance and proclamation, her body becomes the site through which language is enacted—gesture, text, and image converging to expose the mechanics of persuasion. Removed from narrative time, these images position the magician not only as the orchestrator of illusion but also as its medium, revealing how political rhetoric, like the vanishing act, depends on repetition, belief, and the careful staging of appearances. In this, the work probes the unstable relation between those who serve the scenography of the nation-state and the political apparatuses that instrumentalise them, asking how such agents may themselves become subject to ideological capture as the structures they uphold fold back into nationalist revision.