Ideologies of display 2008

Ideologies of Display is a series of large scale photographs of architectural installations that the artist has meticulously constructed in her studio. These sets have been constructed by following specific tactics and methods that have been used by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin who, along with his group Tecton, became one of the significant players of the 1930s architecture in the UK. Together they authored the early modernist panopticum displays, the ZOO pavilions of the Dudley and London ZOOs, architectures where for the first time the animal within a display can be seen at all times and from any position of the spectator.

By revisiting Lubetkin’s work Cibic explores the architectonic apparatus of the phenomena of the exhibition space and its ideological constructs behind the surface, and therefore questions the operative mechanisms that define its character and value as well as its reception. Figures of animals in cages de-construct the 1930s’ strategies of display of zoological exhibits, which followed very strong rules in order to create a space in which the animal could not hide from the onlookers gaze. The series extends the architecture beyond its use of being solely an object for displaying and turns it into an actual object of display. The artist thus focuses on the means of presentation and enhances what was to remain hidden – the ideology of showing.