Gifts of Friendship

The exhibition Utopia. The Right to Hope brings artistic positions together, that in the face of global crises develop specific visions for a more just and sustainable way of living. In addition to a critical examination of utopia itself — with its promise of happiness as well as its totalitarian implications — Utopia focuses on projects that aim to create change on a small scale. The works and objects on display suggest alternative ways of life that seem unattainable from today’s perspective. Art in particular can make pioneering contributions to utopian models of the future. Since the modern era it has critically engaged with social processes through its range of aesthetic and thematic means. This critical stance has always made art a space for utopian thinking.

Artists and collectives
AES+F, Kader Attia, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, melanie bonajo, Cao Fei, Anetta Mona Chişa und Lucia Tkáčová, Jasmina Cibic, Stephan Huber und Raimund Kummer, Sven Johne, Keiken, Mischa Leinkauf, Cornelia Parker, Lin May Saeed, Jaanus Samma, Tomás Saraceno, Terreform ONE, Nasan Tur und Liam Young.

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