Topical Devices

Under the title Topical Devices, Jasmina Cibic develops a series of suspended sculptural works that function as archival protrusions: fragmented spatial objects in which histories of political representation, architecture, and image-making are compressed into unstable monumental forms. The sculptures draw from archival photographs documenting the construction of nation-states and political systems that no longer exist, most notably the former Yugoslavia and the internationalist project of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Emerging from the wider research framework of Spielraum, the series continues Cibic’s investigation into how architecture, art, and spectacle were mobilised to construct new political imaginaries during moments of geopolitical transformation. Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia occupied a unique position within the Non-Aligned Movement, exporting not only diplomatic ideology but also architectural expertise, urban planning, and monumental aesthetics across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Yugoslav architects, engineers, and artists participated in the construction of governmental buildings, cultural institutions, memorials, hotels, and infrastructures throughout the non-aligned world, contributing to a transnational visual language intended to embody modernisation, solidarity, anti-colonialism, and collective progress.

Cibic’s sculptures reimagine these monumental ambitions through a process of fragmentation and suspension. Their forms are often derived from architectural details, abstract spatial elements, or sculptural motifs associated with representative state architecture and memorial culture. Onto these structures, Cibic places images sourced from archives documenting ceremonies of inauguration, construction sites, political gatherings, and symbolic acts of nation-building. Removed from their original contexts, the images cease to function as straightforward historical records and instead become floating ideological residues — suspended between utopian projection and historical collapse.

The title Topical Devices deliberately invokes both media apparatuses and architectural instruments: objects designed to transmit, stage, or direct political meaning. Rather than reconstructing lost monuments nostalgically, Cibic approaches them as unfinished propositions whose visual and ideological potentials remain unresolved. The suspended forms suggest architectural fragments detached from the systems that once anchored them, hovering between memory and speculation, archive and fiction.

Across the series, monumentality is treated not as permanence, but as choreography: a temporary alignment of image, ideology, and collective desire. By revisiting the spatial and aesthetic languages of former political futures, Cibic asks what remains of projects built on promises of transnational solidarity and emancipatory modernity once the states that produced them disappear.