20th Century 2010

20th Century is a photographic series developed alongside a group of sculptural objects, first presented at the 6th Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana. Produced in collaboration with a trainer of birds of prey, the work stages encounters between trained raptors and sculptural replicas of canonical twentieth-century design objects, which function simultaneously as perches and as carriers of cultural value.

The series examines spectatorship as an extractive condition, tracing parallel histories in which both nature and culture are captured, instrumentalised, and recirculated as value. Birds of prey—once deployed as tools of survival—were gradually transformed into emblems of nobility, later reappearing within regimes of leisure, spectacle, and corporate display. Design objects follow a comparable trajectory: stabilised through authorship and canonisation, they circulate as condensed forms of cultural capital. In 20th Century, these two lineages converge, each rendered as a support system for the other.

By collapsing the distinction between perch and artwork, Cibic displaces the design object from its symbolic autonomy into a functional role, while simultaneously aestheticising the animal as an object of display. This reciprocal instrumentalisation exposes the mechanisms through which value is produced: not as an intrinsic property, but as an effect of framing, classification, and repetition within systems of display.

The work draws on the historical convergence of these regimes within bourgeois interiors, where taxidermied animals and artworks formed composite arrangements of ownership, taste, and control. Here, this logic is extended into a fictive yet recognisable collection in which the bird and the object occupy equivalent positions—both framed, aestheticised, and made available to the viewer under the same conditions. What is extracted is not the object itself, but the experience it is made to produce.

The central sculptural installation draws upon museological display systems and modernist zoological architecture to interrogate their entanglement with colonial histories. It invokes the scenographic language of the circus alongside architectures of control, performance, and the fantasy of otherness. Extending Cibic’s ongoing investigation into how aesthetic and spatial regimes operate as instruments of influence, the sculpture foregrounds the act of display as a site where perception and ideology are actively produced. It functions simultaneously as device and metaphor—a structure that choreographs vision while revealing the patriarchal politics embedded in systems of visibility.

Conceived as a hybrid between pedestal, perch, and design object, the work draws on the formal vocabulary of iconic 20th-century modernism—forms historically endowed with cultural authority and symbolic capital. Reconfigured as supports for display, these structures expose the hierarchies they once concealed, making visible the conditions under which objects are framed, encountered, and assigned value.

Through this shift, the sculpture relinquishes any claim to autonomy. Its meaning emerges instead through the frameworks that position it—museological, architectural, and ideological. In doing so, the work reflects on how objects come to matter: not as self-contained entities, but as products of the systems that stage and sustain their visibility.