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.