JASMINA CIBIC – FIRM FOUNDATIONS
2017-02-20Cibic’s work seeks to establish dialogues between politically latent objects from diverse historical or linguistic and media spaces. Hers is a practice that addresses the ways in which visual language, art, architecture, and rhetoric are deployed and instrumentalised by political regimes, before investigating what happens to these fragments when the ideologies they endorse collapse.
Gathering together these symbols and iconographies, Cibic’s projects present a synthesis of gesture, stagecraft and re-enactment. Instantiated in films and installations, hers is also an ongoing performative practice, an ‘enacted’ exercise in the dissection of statecraft. Cibic plays a double-game, at once decoding mechanisms of power whilst building her own exemplary allegorical structures. Tracing lines through history, she undertakes detailed research of official state archives and hidden repositories of authority. The conventions, apologues and narratives she turns her forensic gaze upon are drawn from various players involved in the contrivances of power, working in concert to forge common visions of the nation.
Extending from the gallery window to cover almost half of the space’s walls is Cibic’s The Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured, a performative installation that alludes to the soft power strategies of art and architecture utilized by (trans)national political structures. A wallpaper composed of numerous photographic elements seamlessly stitched together depicts a fictitious monochrome landscape strewn with banners. This picturesque utopia is an amalgam of images taken by Josip Broz Tito’s personal photographers in an attempt to frame the emerging postwar Yugoslavia – artists in the service of the state whose images are necessarily implicated in a political aim despite their circumstantial nature.
Opposite – Firm Foundations, 2017
Exhibition runs through to April 8th, 2017
ZAK | BRANICKA
Lindenstr. 35
D – 10969
Berlin
Germany
