Single channel 4K video, stereo sound
7 min 26 sec in a continuous loop

With support of the Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro, The Non-Aligned Art Collection Laboratory

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
Photogrammetry: Kibla, Slovenia

The artist created the video installation Mothers (2025) 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 (NAM). Established during the Cold War by states that sought an alternative to the polarities of East and West, the Non-Aligned Movement offered a third path: one that privileged solidarity among recently decolonised and emergent nations and promoted cultural, political, and economic autonomy. Within this ideological framework, art was not merely a soft power tool but a form of diplomatic language—a symbolic gesture of sovereignty, alliance, and mutual respect.

From this unique archive, Cibic selected only sculptures depicting female heads, busts, and figures—representations of self-defining mother nations. Chosen by predominantly male government officials and created by male artists, these sculptures stand in as allegorical embodiments of national identity, their forms echoing ideals of nurture, origin, and continuity. Yet the countries they represent—many shaped by the legacies of colonialism and Cold War geopolitics—have seen their cultural narratives repeatedly obfuscated, exoticised, or destroyed by dominant Western paradigms.

In Mothers, these sculptures are linked through a sequence of explosions, transforming their idealised forms into ciphers of ancestral urgency—a matriarchal warning system that spans territories and timelines. The slow rotation of each figure, illuminated like a precious jewel in a storefront display, underscores their objectification and the commodification of identity. As cracks begin to spread and multiply, the sculptures ultimately disintegrate into dust and debris, evoking both the fragility and resilience of cultural memory.

The accompanying soundscape merges ASMR-inspired textures—highlighting the voyeuristic pleasure embedded in witnessing destruction—with the voice of a female narrator who speaks words of resistance and strategies for survival. These fragments are drawn from archival debates on cultural sovereignty and self-determination within the NAM, where art functioned as a frontline in the struggle for ideological independence. Through this work, Cibic reframes the legacy of Non-Alignment as a feminist project—one in which care, vulnerability, and symbolic refusal emerge as acts of geopolitical agency.

The Gravity of Care is conceived as a delegated performance—an intimate exchange between the artist and members of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Cibic invited these advocates to donate their tears, which she then photographed under a microscope. From these images, she constructed a speculative planetary surface, cast as a slowly rotating bronze globe. Its surface appears to depict islands, continents, and waterways—each formation derived directly from the microscopic topographies of tear fluid.

These emotional residues, rendered as terrain, offer a counter-cartography: a world shaped not by conquest or extraction, but by grief, resilience, and endurance. Cast in bronze—a material historically bound to monuments, war memorials, and patriarchal permanence—the globe intentionally subverts the authority of its own medium. Rather than glorifying domination, it commemorates a form of human rights work increasingly marginalised in the contemporary political condition.

The globe’s rotation introduces a meditative, almost hypnotic rhythm—a quiet rebuttal to the static and declarative stance of traditional bronze sculpture. In this motion, the work resists closure, suggesting a living, shifting world imagined through the lens of care.

By inverting the extractivist gaze—turning it toward the microscopic, the emotional, the overlooked—the sculpture functions as an illusionist device. It invites viewers to reconsider planetary imaginaries not as fixed constructs of power, but as fluid sites of intimacy, interdependence, and restitution. The Gravity of Care envisions a world reordered through acts of maintenance, justice, and collective emotional labour—a terrain where tears become the ground from which alternative futures emerge.

Tears gifted by the UN Human Rights Treaty Body on the Rights of the Child

Microscope photography: Mojca Opresnik, Slovene National Institute of Chemistry

This project extends Jasmina Cibic’s ongoing series of performative engagements with the politics of care and human rights advocacy—foregrounding the profound contradictions faced by international institutions in a world increasingly marked by genocide and the erosion of legal and ethical norms. Here, Cibic turns her lens to the current impasse of human rights action, highlighting the dissonance between the aspirational language of treaties and the stark realities of global inaction.

For this work, the artist invited members of the UN Human Rights Treaty Body on the Rights of the Child to donate their tears – intimate, corporeal testimonies to the emotional and intellectual labour embedded in the defence of human dignity. These tears were then photographed under a microscope, revealing crystalline patterns that evoke planetary or topographic surfaces. Transferred onto etched brass plates, the images recall celestial bodies suspended in space—simultaneously distant and charged with meaning.

By transforming these microcosmic traces into planetary forms, Cibic reframes human rights not as abstract principles, but as fragile, embodied terrains—constantly negotiated and perpetually under threat. These works resist monumentality and instead offer speculative cosmologies: proposals for alternative futures built from the emotional sediments of the present and the unrealised promises of the past.

In line with Cibic’s broader practice—which often interrogates the role of culture in nation-building, diplomacy, and ideological performance—this project challenges viewers to reckon with the failure of supranational ideals and the persistence of care-based resistance. Through poetic materiality and political urgency, it becomes both an act of mourning and a proposition for worldbuilding rooted in empathy, solidarity, and remembrance.

Jasmina Cibic: The Gift Ecology

The exchange of animals and plants as diplomatic gifts traces back to the origins of patriarchal author­ity, serving as markers of geopolitical influence and cultural prestige. In modern times, the ultimate em­blem of territorial conquest and colonial ambition became the zoo, which not only showcased global power but also demonstrated the supposed capacity of Western civilisation to control nature and impose an enlightened order.

Socialist Yugoslavia, which aligned itself through the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Move­ment with the recently decolonised countries of the so-called Third World, materialised its diplomatic strategies through a menagerie of animals—tokens of international connection, gathered during Presi­dent Josip Broz Tito’s maritime expeditions to Asia and Africa. These animals were collected, utilised, and understood in ways intimately tied to the em­bodied political practices of the Cold War, helping to craft a vision of Yugoslavia’s political territory and geopolitical ambition.

Yugoslavia’s Brioni island became both a host organ­ism and a replica of the non-aligned world, a geo­graphic imaginary of international politics. Beyond symbolising transnational solidarity, the island func­tioned as a site of Yugoslav statecraft and stagecraft: a stage within a stage where international hierarchies were performed and power relationships negotiat­ed. The case study of the Brioni Island zoo reveals a utopian diplomatic project with worldbuilding potential—one seemingly spared from the colonial aspirations and dominion of the Global North. As such, the Brioni zoo “was not merely a projection of power but a representation of a failed utopia in the making” (Tijana Vuješević, On Animals and Seas: Menageries as Representations of Yugoslav Global and Local Space in the Cold War Era).

The Gift Ecology presents a series of photographs of Yugoslav government documents detailing the exchange of animals and the ritual functions these gifts performed symbolically in constructing a new transnational political space. Jasmina Cibic erases the geograph­ical context surrounding the events, focusing the viewer’s attention instead on the animals’ portraits and the diplomatic viewership their display once served. As many of the countries—and the multi­lateral alignments these animals were tasked to rep­resent—begin to fracture or dissolve, the animals’ role as gifts becomes untethered from the obligation of reciprocity. This frees the contemporary view­er to consider their transformed identities, shaped by shifting power structures and silences—perhaps destined to remain forever backstage, within the lib­erated ruins of colonial and ideological structures.

The Gift Ecology challenges us to see animals not only as silent observers but active agents in the field of politics and international relations – as an archive of soft power and its historical extractivist methods.

Dawn Chorus is an immersive installation featuring recorded birdsong from the homelands of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who have resided in Austria over the past two years. Notably, all these countries were members of the Non-Aligned Movement since its inaugural conference in 1961, with Pakistan joining in 1979. The countries featured 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 Western art institutions.

The installation also reflects on the history of the Belvedere 21 museum, which originally served as a world pavilion at the 1958 Brussels exhibition, where nations showcased their new ideological directions.

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.

Cibic collaborated with scientific illustrators, providing only the Latin or common names—associated with white European men—to challenge colonial narratives. The work examines how the legacy of patriarchal control endures in cultural systems, while questioning cultural capital, who shapes it, and for whom.

The Arrangement is a series of photographic portraits featuring flower arrangements created by the artist in collaboration with key stakeholders from human rights and international law tribunals and organisations including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), International Criminal Court (ICC), European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), UN Human Rights Advisory Committee and the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies.

The artist invited these individuals to select a flower for a floral arrangement envisioned for a conference addressing the human rights issue they personally consider most critical. Photographed in the style of historical vanitas painting, the series underscores the ephemeral nature of justice and the delicate balance between progress and decline in upholding fundamental human rights and the rule of law.

Throughout history, flowers have had an enduring presence at events such as political treaty signings, peace negotiations, and other symbolic milestones underscoring their role as potent symbols for what is perceived as the apex of human achievement and evolution. By examining their historical significance as visual tools that bestow symbolic status and legitimacy upon different forms of power, the artist addresses the complex interplay between visual representation, perceived hierarchies of power and the role of the artist as an intermediary within this constellation.

The Arrangement (International Criminal Court), 2024

Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa, Judge Beti Hohler, Judge Kimberly Prost, Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan.

The Arrangement (International Court of Justice), 2024

Judge Hillary Charlesworth, Judge Leonardo Nemer Caldeira Brant, Judge Sarah H. Cleveland, Judge Dire Tladi, Judge Iwasawa Yuji.

The Arrangement (Court of Justice of the European Union)

Judge Petra Škvařilová-Pelzl, President of the Fith Chamber Jesper Svenningsen, Judge Mariyana Kancheva, Judge Tihamér Tóth, Judge Heikki Kanninen, Judge Johannes Christoph Laitenberger, Judge Ion Gâlea, Judge Damjan Kukovec, President of the Sixth Chamber Maria José Costeira, Judge Gerhard Hesse, Judge Krisztián Kecsmár, Judge Maja Brkan, President of the Third Chamber Fredrik Schalin, President of the Tenth Chamber Ornella Porchia.

The Arrangement (UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee), 2024

Ms. Vasilka Sancin, Mr. Frans Viljoen, Mr. Aldo de Campos Costa, Ms. Patrycja Sasnal, Mr. Rabah Boudache, Ms. Nadia Amal Bernoussi, Mr. Buhm-Suk Baek, Ms. Milena Costas.

Jasmina Cibic’s film Beacons is a cinematographic journey portraying eight women who distil the archive of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement into a musical score. They translate and decipher words into sounds, music and choreography and meet within a proposition for an address recasting the unrealised promises of the past into a sonic address as a rehearsal for our present. Filmed on isolated architectures steeped in nature that once served the awakening of transnational solidarity, the project aims to re-inscribe the missing female voice into the history of world-building.

For the script, Cibic utilised the speeches delivered at the first conference of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1985, held in Titograd, Yugoslavia. During this event, academics, artists, curators, and politicians shared strategies for achieving cultural independence, spiritual decolonisation, moral rehabilitation, and the emancipation of developing Non-Aligned countries. These individuals were leaders in the cultural spheres, aiming to create new scenographic backdrops as part of the alternative world-building project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the bi-polar division of the world during the Cold War.

The locations in the film present a series of architectures and sites whose role it was to announce, defend, remind and alert a multinational state in its becoming. Cibic’s protagonists here use both the architecture and the landscape as amplifiers for their voice and action and inscribe a feminist reading of patriarchal architectural sites and re-engage with their world building potential via a feminist lens. The missing female voice from systemic and anti-systemic world-building projects is here embodied as a cypher that re-inscribes a possibility of an emancipated future of collective agency.

But there is another lens through which Cibic selects the architectures for her film: all these structures are positioned within epic landscapes, serving as beacons and power verticals, metaphorically representing the pursuit of alternative world-building that they formally proclaimed. These protrusions manifest idealistic beliefs of attainable potential, which Cibic now revisits, albeit through a feminist corrective lens of their original world building purpose.

Commissioned by IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, co-produced by Waddington Studio London, IMMA and Snaporazverein. Supported by the Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory, Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro; ZOOM Europa – Cultural Association for Central and Eastern Europe, Biennale Jogja 17 and Friends of Nomad.

Jasmina Cibic: The Dreams We Call Our Own, a performative installation for 8 voices
In collaboration with Barbara Kinga Majewska
Co-comissoned by Kunsthaus Graz and Steirisher herbst ‘23

The Dreams We Call Our Own builds on the artist’s research on the exchanges between the art and culture workers of the Non-Aligned Countries held in Titograd, Yugoslavia between 21st and 25th October 1985. There, in a series of lectures and presentations, academics, artists, curators and politicians shared strategies on achieving cultural independence, spiritual decolonisation, moral rehabilitation and emancipation of the developing countries of the Non-Aligned; these were leaders of the cultural spheres that aimed to create new scenographic backdrops as the founders of the alternative world-building project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the bi-polar division of the world during the cold war.
Cibic has meticulously combed through the archive of these meetings and debates and from it drew together a propositional text that takes form of a political address. Combining sentences from diverse historical contributions found in the archive – Cibic collected instruction-like phrases that suggest how to achieve self-determination of an oppressed identity.
Cibic conceived the work The Dreams We Call Our Own as a deconstruction of the patriarchal form of the medium of political address itself. The artist has invited the composer and artist Barbara Kinga Majewska to create a new musical composition for eight singers. The performance engaged the octet within the space of the top floor of Kunsthaus Graz. Spaced throughout the architecture, the performers inhabit it suspended from hanging structures – constructions that create a metaphoric amplifier for the enacted archival traces of self-determination.
As the viewers navigated the space, the durational performance was presented as a loop, inviting a meditation on the birth of a new language through a newly proposed prism of non-hierarchical listening.
By reassembling a series of historical ready-mades drawn from different – but always constant – patriarchal sublimation tactics of language and communication – with art and culture as their tools – The Dreams We Call Our Own intended to create a speculative stage where a reversal of instrumentalisation takes place – as the elements of national scenography become the conductors of a renewed communication system with its audience.

The project was made with support of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Montenegro. The Laboratory is led and developed by a team of curators and conservators: Marina Šaranović, Anita Ćulafić, Nada Baković and Natalija Vujošević.

The Gallery of Non-Aligned continues Cibic’s photographic series The Gift Economy and the artist’s interaction with a highly specific set of archives: Cibic namely revisits collections, which speak of attempts of political gifting of culture, made with intent to bind national or transnational sets of relations.  

The Gallery of Non-Aligned presents a series of photographic portraits of a selection of sculptures from the collection of the Art Gallery of the Non-Aligned Countries held at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Montenegro, the only official collection of artworks donated by heads of states, cultural workers and artists from the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The Non-Aligned Movement can be regarded as one of a number of critical “anti-systemic world-making projects” (Getachew) after the Second World War, a form of transnational solidarity with a vision of a counter-hegemonic modernizing globalization whose dominant actors, with the exception of socialist Yugoslavia, were situated outside the European space. In its own way, NAM offered alternatives not only to East-West conflicts in the context of the Cold War but also expressed the hopes of a world emerging from colonial domination of the South by the North.

Cibic’s series depicts only the sculptures of female form – the metaphors for the emerging mother-nations: female torsos, busts and heads. Photographed on colourful backgrounds, they stand reminiscent of flags and national iconographies, but also contain references to darkness, decay and corrosion, as they are coated by various species of moths, referencing historic vanitas painting – a reminder of all there is to lose in the act of forgetting past potentials of alternative world building. 

The project is made with support of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at Centre of Contemporary Art Montenegro. The Laboratory is led and developed by a team of curators and conservators: Marina Šaranović, Anita Ćulafić, Nada Baković and Natalija Vujošević.

Charm Offensive is an installation Cibic created in collaboration with a group of international scientific botanical illustrators. The project aims to address the colonial violence imposed by national and political powers both on nature and culture. Borrowing the phrase that was first used to describe the political tactics of adversaries in the Cold War, Charm Offensive denotes a calculated campaign that uses propaganda values to gain favour or support.

The project is comprised from a series of illustrations of plants that bear the names of the first European colonisers and botanists that became agents of empire and as such facilitated a global information exchange that often contested territories and their resources.

With plant ‘discovery’ by the European colonisers, and the ‘gifting’ of names that followed the newly invented Linnaean taxonomy, local knowledge would be erased, and local names annulled. As such, botany 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.

In Charm Offensive, Cibic reverses the historical strategies of European ‘re-discovery’ of species – where their newly gifted Latin name would be the last to arrive in the process of their re-inscription within the European ‘civilised’ world. The artist reached out to botanical illustrators and altered the standard workflow of their practice – giving them only the Latin name of the plant to use as the reference for its proposed appearance. Cibic selected plants whose names honour the historically celebrated plant hunters and colonisers – who in compliance aided the colonial enterprise and became instruments of imperialist expansions. Working with botanical namesakes of Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, James Cook, Carl Linnaeus and George Hibbert – the proposed illustrations decode the language of the discipline and insert a feminist decolonial potential of rewriting the history of patriarchal domination.

The proposed botanical illustrations are exhibited alongside a series of engravings of iron grate fences and barriers of the first botanical gardens, whose networks served as laboratories for the acclimation and exchange of economically valuable plants. Instead of names of the gardens themselves, the iron bars bear phrases drawn from botany that have been directly borrowed by the political and diplomatic context: rose garden strategies, symbiotic patterns, dormant diversion, scents of persuasion…

The spaces of political and national power continue to thrive on botanical depictions and floral arrangements as ‘unobtrusive’ politically – either as floral attributes to conference rooms or ‘benign’ still lives decorating the spaces of political power. But is should be the darker side of political servitude of plants which these very spaces should be debating, a side which is exponentially relevant for our society today.