Jasmina Cibic — NADA (Act I, Act II, Act III), 2017 – 2018

Presented in the exhibition MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES — Art / Design / Dunkerque – Krefeld

Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque
24 January – 30 August 2026

General curators: Katia Baudin (Director, Kunstmuseen Krefeld) & Keren Detton (Director, Frac Grand Large) 
Curator of the Dunkerque exhibition: Keren Detton

Participating artists include:
Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Richard Artschwager, Marion Baruch, Peter Behrens, Henryk Berlewi, Bless, Shannon Bool, Franck Bragigand, Marcel Broodthaers, Alexander Calder, Christo, Jasmina Cibic, Sonia Delaunay, Walter Dexel, Volker Döhne, Helmut Dorner, Paul Dressler, Otto Eckmann, Lucio Fontana, Ludger Gerdes, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Hans Haacke, Peter Halley, Anton Henning, Candida Höfer, Vassily Kandinsky, Annette Kelm, Konrad Klapheck, Yves Klein, Harald Klingelhöller, Karin Kneffel, Eva Kot’átková, Jannis Kounellis, Adolf Luther, László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Mohrbutter, Marcel Odenbach, Claes Oldenburg, Otto Piene, Sigmar Polke, Norbert Prangenberg, raumlaborberlin, David Reed, Gerhard Richter, Hans Theo Richter, Dieter Roth, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Martin Schwenk, Gerry Schum, Daniel Spoerri, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Tinguely, Rosemarie Trockel, Timm Ulrichs, Ignacio Uriarte, Isabelle Vannobel, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West.

Set within the expansive architecture of the Lacaton & Vassal building that hosts Frac Grand Large, MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES brings together historical, archival, and contemporary works to question how museums evolve, how they inhabit space, and how artistic legacies circulate and are reactivated across borders. The exhibition constitutes a major cultural exchange between Dunkerque and Krefeld marking 50 years of a civic and institutional partnership, and foregrounds the museum as a site of critical inquiry, social engagement, and aesthetic experimentation.

Within this ambitious framework, Jasmina Cibic presents her film trilogy NADA: Act I, Act II, Act III, deepening the exhibition’s examination of how institutions—architectural, political, and cultural—stage ideologies and shape the imaginaries of modernity.

A Trilogy on the Architectures of Statecraft, Cultural Seduction, and the Afterlives of Soft Power

NADA is a three-part film project that scrutinises the strategic role of art, architecture, and performance within the machinery of nation-building. Across its three Acts, the trilogy follows a choreography of persuasion in which aesthetics are mobilised to communicate ideology, stabilise political alliances, and project visions of progress.

Each film situates itself within a historically charged architectural space—modernist showcases, diplomatic interiors, and state-sanctioned cultural gifts—allowing the built environment to function as both stage and protagonist. These spaces, as seen throughout MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES, echo the exhibition’s broader inquiry into how modern architecture has served as a vehicle for political ambition and institutional identity.

Act I focuses on a mid-century landmark commission intended to embody national ideals, staging a negotiation between cultural advisors, architects, and political representatives.
Act II unfolds in an interior shaped by diplomatic protocol, where performers animate speeches and policy documents, revealing the aestheticised labour of political consensus.
Act III revisits a site of symbolic cultural gifting—an architectural offering intended to cement geopolitical relations—where archival dialogue exposes the language of international friendship and soft power.

Across the trilogy, the character NADA (“hope” in several Slavic languages, yet also resonant with emptiness) carries the paradox of cultural idealism within ideological frameworks. She embodies both the aspirational promise of art and the risk of its instrumentalisation.

Through precise mise-en-scène and the reactivation of archival discourse, Cibic examines how cultural infrastructures produce political meaning—making ideology appear natural, desirable, even beautiful. Yet the trilogy also points toward alternative readings: moments when scripted narratives falter, when monumental gestures reveal their fragility, and when institutional futures may be reimagined.

In the context of MUSÉES HORS FRONTIÈRES, NADA reflects on the museum itself as a political technology—an apparatus that collects, preserves, legitimises, and performs the values of a society. By situating the trilogy within this cross-border exhibition, the work interrogates how institutions inherit histories, how they enact power, and how they might propose new modes of solidarity and cultural responsibility.

Together, Acts I–III form a meditation on the choreography of national self-image—and on what becomes possible when that choreography is exposed, questioned, or disrupted.

Jasmina Cibic’s The Gift Ecology continues the artist’s exploration of the anthropological concept of the gift and its inherent obligations of circulation and reciprocity, as succinctly described by Marcel Mauss in his seminal essay The Gift. At Void Art Centre, Cibic focuses on the extractivism of both nature and culture within the history of political gifting—particularly gifts that supported the construction of transnational spheres of influence through soft power strategies.

The Gift Ecology presents a new body of work spanning video installation, photography, and sculpture. These works converge in restoring agency to art objects, animals, and plants once gifted in the name of the nation. In Cibic’s installation, human and non-human actors come together as storytellers, proposing a shared politics of mutualism, collaboration, justice, and care.

A series within the exhibition, also titled The Gift Ecology, features photographs of Yugoslav government documents detailing the exchange of animals and the ritualistic functions these gifts served in constructing a new transnational political space during the Cold War—namely, the Non-Aligned Movement. This forum of developing and largely postcolonial states proposed a “third way” of governance, resisting the polarisation of the world between the United States and the Soviet Union. Cibic overlays these archival images with white pencil, erasing the surrounding geographical landscapes and directing the viewer’s attention solely to the animals’ portraits and the diplomatic gaze their presentation once served. As many of the countries—and the multilateral alignments these animals were meant to represent—fracture and dissolve, the obligation of reciprocity tethered to these gifts dissipates. The animals, once symbols of soft power, are reframed as agents, inhabiting the ruins of colonial and ideological structures. In this context, The Gift Ecology invites us to see animals as a living archive of ongoing extractivist methods of cultural diplomacy – even within the building of the postcolonial transnational space.

Mothers (2025), a new video work, was created within the context of the archive of the Gallery of the Non-Aligned—the only institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting artworks gifted by heads of state, ambassadors, and cultural elites of the Non-Aligned Movement. From this archive, Cibic selected only sculptures depicting female heads, busts, and figures—representations of emergent mother nations. Chosen by predominantly male government officials and created by male artists, these sculptures stand in as allegorical mother nations, representing countries whose cultural capital has consistantly been obfuscated, exoticised, and/or destroyed by Western powers. In the video, these sculptures are linked through a sequence of explosions, transforming them into ciphers of ancestral urgency—a matriarchal warning system spanning territories and timelines. Illuminated like precious jewels and rotating slowly as if in a storefront display, the sculptures develop cracks that exponentially accumulate until the objects ultimately disintegrate into dust and debris, only to re-emerge as a new sculptural configuration. These too are female forms, mothers shaped by different cultural and political contexts. This cyclical eternal transformation underlines the necessity of the enduring process of resilience-building, where symbolic collapse becomes the ground for reinvention. The accompanying soundscape merges ASMR-inspired textures—highlighting the contemporary voyeuristic pleasures derived from destruction—with a female narrator voicing words of resistance and strategies for survival, drawn from archival debates on cultural sovereignty and self-determination.

The final component of the exhibition is a collaborative project with United Nations human rights advocates. The UN, as the symbolic parent of the Non-Aligned Movement, was the setting where the term “Non-Alignment” was first introduced by India and Yugoslavia in 1950 in relation to the Korean War. For this work, Cibic invited members of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies to donate their tears, which she then photographed under a microscope. Resembling planetary terrains, these images are transferred onto brass plates. At first glance resembling celestial bodies, the works confront viewers with the fragile terrain of human rights advocacy within the erosion of international law. They serve as a speculative invitation to imagine a more just world—even as a parallel universe built from the potential futures of the past.

The exhibition culminates in a suspended bronze globe featuring fictional islands, continents, and waterways—all derived from the microscopic tear photographs. Cast in bronze—a material historically bound to patriarchal symbols of power—the rotating globe suggests a reversal of the extractivist gaze employed by hegemonic systems in the production of patriarchial spectacle. The sculpture becomes an illusionist device, hinting at new planetary imaginaries born from care, resilience, and restitution.

Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition at Void Art Centre addresses both historical and contemporary contexts of self-determination and cultural emancipation. Through its layered installations, the exhibition reflects on the extractivism of nature and culture as tools of nation-building. It interrogates our present-day fascination with ruins, the exoticisation of indigeneity in post-collapse cultural movements, and asks: What role can art and culture play within dissolved systems of solidarity – and care and how might they help us imagine new forms of agency?

Credits:

Tears gifted by the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies
Microscope photography: Mojca Opresnik, Slovene National Institute of Chemistry

Photogrammetry: Kibla, Slovenia
Voice Over: Anna-Louise Plowman
Visual Effects Supervisor: Henrik Bach Christensen
Lighting and rendering Christoph G. Balanescu
Effects TD: Leo Evershed
Wangle Studio producer: Sune Neye
Sound design: Sašo Kalan

With support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro, The Non-Aligned Art Collection Laboratory, Museum of Yugoslavia, the Slovene National Institute of Chemistry and Waddington Studios London

Brief Histories presents Charm Offensive by Jasmina Cibic, on view from Thursday, December 12, 2024 to Saturday, January 11, 2025.

Charm Offensive highlights culture’s position in political diplomacy and the use of art in nation building, investigating culture’s role as a political style-bearer and a Trojan horse for covert diplomacy and political interests. Featuring the film The Gift (2021) and a selection of drawings from the series, Charm Offensive (2022), the works in the exhibition cut into the intersections of cultural and political gifting, and the manipulation of natural and social systems for political gain.

Cibic, an artist acclaimed for her multidisciplinary approach—spanning film, performance and installation—interrogates sites of culture in the service of statecraft and ideological agendas. Her work critically examines how diverse forces in culture from architecture, art, and botany have been co-opted to shape political narratives and reinforce systems of power. The Gift, an enigmatic, sonically driven film, explores the idea of gifting as essential to national identity formation and its entwinements with artistic production. The film addresses the concept of a political gift—a donation of artistic, architectural, political or philosophical thought—to national and ideological structures. Filmed within iconic architectural landmarks including Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, the Palais of the Nations in Geneva, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw and Mount Buzludzha, Bulgaria—each a political gift in its own right—three men (an artist, a diplomat, and an engineer) compete to create the perfect gift to the world. As their ideas are judged by allegorical figures of texts and ideologies, and through meticulous cinematography and dialogue sourced from historical archives, The Gift illustrates the ways cultural and architectural symbols are weaponized in the pursuit of soft power.

In Charm Offensive, Cibic explores the political implications of the “gifting” of names within Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy system—a system that prohibits altering names, even when they reference politically contentious figures. Collaborating with international botanical illustrators, Cibic highlights how Linnaean taxonomy erased local knowledge, replacing it with patriarchal and colonial ideologies. By focusing exclusively on Latin names tied to historical figures associated with colonization, she critiques the enduring legacies of colonial power embedded in names that are presented as “natural” within scientific practices. The installation features botanical illustrations that reinterpret these namesakes, alongside a series of engravings of iron fences from botanical gardens—historical sites that functioned as laboratories for the acclimation and exchange of economically valuable plants. The iron bars are inscribed with phrases derived from botany and repurposed by the political and diplomatic context, emphasizing the persistent political servitude of culture and nature to patriarchal systems of power.
Upcoming Public Program:

The Gift and The Stage: Olga Touloumi on Jasmina Cibic
Saturday, December 14, 2024 at 4pm

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program presented by Dr. Olga Touloumi, Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Launching from her insights into diplomatic architecture, found in her newly published book Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior, Touloumi will speak to the political gifting of architectural sites as a form of soft power—an exchange central to Cibic’s film The Gift (2021). Expanding on the particular architectural and political histories present in the film,—analyses the gift economy’s production of the myths that constitute national identity. The Gift and The Stage takes place on Saturday, December 14 at 4pm, and visitors are encouraged to view the exhibition prior to the talk.

Dr. Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns the role of architecture and media in 20th-century forms of liberal internationalism. Her book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and Worldmaking in the United Nations concerns the design and building of 20th-century public platforms for multilateralism and international relations. She published Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior in October 2024. Touloumi has presented her work internationally and her writing has appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes, among them the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and her research has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Bard College, Harvard University, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Propondis Foundation. Touloumi is the co-founder of the Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC) and board member of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a master of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before arriving at Bard, she taught architectural history at MIT and at Harvard University.

Jasmina Cibic: Dawn Chorus, Belvedere21, Vienna

Dawn Chorus is an immersive sound installation that explores the intersections of migration, labour and world-making. The project draws inspiration from the remarkable story of Angela Piskernik, a Slovenian scientist who successfully campaigned to halt the export of songbirds from Yugoslavia in the late 1950s just as the Non-Aligned Movement was being founded on the Brijuni Islands in former Yugoslavia drawing on the principles of the Bandung Conference. This narrative serves as a springboard for contemplating the connections between geopolitical notions of exoticism and the commercial value attached to them, a theme that resonates deeply in the art world’s constant pursuit of otherness: the global movement of cultural production and its exotification continues to have a profound impact on regions in the Global South and Eastern Europe.

Dawn Chorus presents an immersive installation featuring recorded birdsong from the homelands of the majority of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children residing in Austria within the last two years. These are incidentally also all countries that were members of the Non-Aligned Movement since its inaugural conference in 1961, with Pakistan joining in 1979. Most of these nations, except for Tunisia, also participated at the historic Bandung Conference. The countries in Dawn Chorus include Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia, and India.

The installation focuses on sound as a place-maker while also drawing a poignant connection between migration, displacement, and the labour undertaken by migrant communities throughout history. Many of these labour experiences are tied to early morning hours spent in cleaning and maintenance roles, highlighting the profound impact of migration on both personal identity and societal structures – including the Western art institutions, where many of its maintenance staff continue to come from developing countries. Here the bird song from all the diverse territories meets within the museum’s garden, forming a new, hypothetical sonic space of co-existence, resuscitating a non-nationalist form of music.

Ultimately the installation also refers to the history of the building itself, which served as a world pavilion at the 1958 Brussels exhibition – the first major global event after World War II. For this exhibition, countries meticulously curated their presentations with great political attention to announce to the world their new ideological direction. This was a pivotal moment when soft power was fully realised via the national architectural and cultural achievements of each nation.

The birds included in the installation are all named after European naturalists, colonial administrators and missionaries who became agents of empires and as such facilitated a global information exchange that often contested territories and their resources. With bird ‘discoveries’ by the Europeans, and the ‘gifting’ of names that followed the newly invented Linnaean taxonomy and the tradition of gifting new (European) common names, local knowledge would be erased and local names annulled. As such, discovery became complicit with the destruction of worlds taking place within the colonial project. The Linnaean taxonomy system with its binomial nomenclature presents one of the last systems of patriarchal control that has not been problematised and rewritten; namely its rules do not allow for the names of organisms to be changed, even when they bear tribute to politically problematic namesakes – including colonisers and slave owners.

I wanted to reverse the historical strategies of European ‘re-discovery’ of species – where their newly gifted Latin or common name would be the last to arrive in the process of their re-inscription within the European ‘civilised’ world. I reached out to scientific illustrators and altered the standard workflow of their practice – giving them only the Latin and/or common name of the bird to use as the reference for its proposed appearance. Working with namesakes of white European men – the proposed illustrations decode the language of the discipline and insert a decolonial potential of rewriting the history of patriarchal domination.

Against the backdrop of the current global socio-political, climate, and migration crises, the concept of the nation-state is increasingly being scrutinised as a legitimate model for the future. This prompts us to question what constitutes cultural capital within the contemporary condition, how it is shaped, by whom, and for whom.

Jasmina Cibic

AFGHANISTAN

The Hume’s Short-toed Lark (Calandrella acutirostris) is named after Allan Octavian Hume, a British ornithologist, colonial administrator, and founder of the Indian National Congress. The illustrator envisions the bird with uniquearchitectural characteristics such as feathers that evoke traditional headdresses of the region. The detail of the bird’s skull bones and of tail feathers recall the architecture of India and the delicate markings on the egg of this species bear a resemblance to a mosaic pattern found on mosques in Afghanistan.

Laura Montserrat (BA Biology, University of São Paulo, Brazil) is one of the founders of the Scientific Illustration Nucleus of the University of São Paulo. She works with the Biosciences Institute, the Oceanographic Institute and the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo. 

SYRIA

Hemprich’s Horned Lark (Eremophila bilopha) is named after Friedrich Wilhelm Hemprich, a German naturalist and zoologist who travelled to the Libyan desert in 1820 as part of an expedition led by the Prussian General von Minutoli. He was sponsored by the Berlin Academy and later by the Austrian consul, allowing him to continue his explorations to Syria and Lebanon. The illustrator portrays the bird showcasing effective desert camouflage, along with subtle hints of iridescence in its feathers that might have captured the interest of European explorers.

Sandra Doyle specialised in Scientific Illustration at Middlesex Polytechnic, England and is a member of the Association of Botanical Artists. Her botanical illustrations are included at the RBGE Florilegium and RHS Lindley Library collections and her publications include the BBC Wildlife Magazine. 

TUNISIA

Tristram’s Warbler (Curruca deserticola) is named after Henry Baker Tristram, an English clergyman, ornithologist, and explorer who conducted ornithological research in North Africa and Palestine. A proponent of Darwinism, Tristram sought to reconcile evolution and creation, dedicating his time to both natural history observations and identifying localities referenced in the Old and New Testaments. The illustrator envisions the bird adorned in hues reminiscent of the Sahara sands, blending seamlessly into the rocky terrain and ravines.

Sara Menon is a natural science illustrator based in Italy. She has taught at the Biomedical Visualisation programme, University of Illinois Chicago with prof. J. Daugherty.

INDIA

Jerdon’s Courser (Rhinoptilus bitorquatus) is a critically endangered bird species named after Thomas C. Jerdon, who described the bird in 1848. Facing threats from palm oil deforestation, it stands as India’s rarest bird and is among the world’s top 50 rare bird species. The illustrator imagines the bird as a small and fascinating creature, with a small appendix near the beak and unique colour patterns that differentiate between immature individuals and adult males and females.

Iñaki Diez Cortaberria graduated in veterinary medicine from the Complutense University of Madrid. He works with the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid and has been a professor of scientific illustration in a postgraduate master’s degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid.

PAKISTAN

Sirkeer Malkoha (Phaenicophaeus leschenaultii) is named after the French botanist Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour, known for sending many of the plants and seeds he discovered to the French island of Réunion for cultivation. Among his contributions were two varieties of sugar cane and six varieties of cotton. He was honoured with the Legion of Honour for his work. The illustrator portrays the bird as an estuary-dwelling species, characterised by its small and agile nature, with long distinctive  tail feathers that set it apart.

Sarah McNaboe is a Scientific Illustrator based in Honolulu, Hawaii. She worked as an Illustrator for the International Ocean Discovery Program onboard the scientific drilling ship JOIDES Resolution. A member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, she works for their Journal of Natural Science Illustration. 

EGYPT

Bonelli’s Eagle (Aquila fasciata) was named after the Italian ornithologist and collector Franco Andrea Bonelli, who served as a professor of zoology at the University of Turin and assembled one of the largest ornithological collections in Europe. The illustrator envisions Bonelli’s Eagle as a unique species with striking and uncommon white patterning. This distinct feature might have evolved as an adaptation to the intense heat of its environment. The unusual colouration would likely draw the attention of European ornithologists exploring the region, intrigued by its evolutionary significance and rarity.

Stephanie Rozzo earned her Master’s Certificate from California State University Monterey Bay and did her internship with National Geographic Magazine’s Art Department. She also has a Bachelor of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona and has worked in raptor training and care.