The Siren Song of Cultural Diplomacy
a gift of truth, not in the realm of appearances, but in the reality of aspirations
—The Gift, Jasmina Cibic
The Gift, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
The scene opens in the swimming pool of the Palace of Youth, located within the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. A gift to the Polish people from Joseph Stalin, the Palace is the pinnacle of socialist realism in its cold monumentality. Yet it is three young girls who activate the imposing structure: expressionless, one by one, they stride the length of the pool, ascend the diving platforms, and in unison pitch lithely into the still water below. For a brief moment, they break form, basking in the fleeting freedom of the chlorinated depths before returning to the surface.
Recently shown at Brief Histories as part of a solo exhibition titled Charm Offensive, Jasmina Cibic’s 20-minute, three-channel film, The Gift, distills highly aestheticized performances of political power into a single narrative. Examining the art system as supranatural colonizer, The Gift enters into the very apparatus it depicts. Cibic deftly enacts the choreography of the international gift economy, with the sanitized sacredness of modernism acting as both stage and protagonist.
Although the three preadolescent girls frame the narrative, it is three male characters, the allegorical “gifts” of art, music, and architecture, on whom it centers. A panel of judges representing the feminized figures of the “Four Freedoms” calmly dictate a competition between the men to conceive of a work of art that is both aesthetically and politically adequate to reconcile an imminent global crisis.
Cibic’s practice spans film, performance, sculpture, and installation, often hinging on obtaining access to spaces of national or international significance. Born in Slovenia and based in London, she examines mechanisms of soft power, exploring art and architecture as means of deploying political rhetoric. Her projects are often rooted in the history of the Non-Aligned Movement—created in 1961 to advocate decolonization and advance solidarity among developing countries in opposition to the two global powers, the United States and the U.S.S.R.—which has been completely annihilated by the West, both territorially and culturally.
I had the opportunity to speak to Cibic regarding her recent and upcoming projects, the complex entanglements of gender and statecraft, and the complicity of artists in the production of national culture.
Emma Fiona Jones: In The Gift and many of your projects, cinematography, language, and architecture are closely intertwined. This made me think of Beatriz Colomina, who seems to have a presence in your work, and her idea that modern architecture would not exist without mass media. Can you talk about the relationship between architecture and media in your work?
Jasmina Cibic: I really love Beatriz Colomina—the idea of feminist deconstruction of patriarchal structures.
I come from the former Yugoslavia. [Russian artist] Ilya Kabakov Once really brilliantly said, “Every artist compensates [for] what is lacking.” I was 10 when we had the war. I went to Italy and then the UK to study. So I was always really interested in how culture is used as a vehicle of soft power, and how we [artists] can play the double game. I think that these ideas are even more prevalent currently, with AI and the rise of new nationalisms. It will be interesting to see: Can artists and thinkers come up with new methodologies of feminist critique?
Architecture, for me, was always that. Architecture is always patriarchal, and especially when you look at nation-building and transnational organizations—this propensity for stage-setting that, throughout history, has been quite extreme. The idea of complicity of the arts in building these patriarchal narratives is what I was really fascinated by.
Architecture really functions as a choreographer, as a cinematographer, as a tower of control. So all of these vehicles of stage-setting, and the necessity of looking through a certain prism, are embedded within architecture—or a specific typology of architecture. It's such a psychological mechanism, and it gets away with murder, in a way.
A lot of the time, only when the original client evacuates the architecture are you able to enter into it and assess these mechanisms. With The Gift, the idea was to create a film work as an organism that is entirely created from a gift of culture. The space itself dictates exactly where you, or the camera, needs to stand. It’s fascinating not only in terms of visibility, but also invisibility: the diplomatic spaces behind the scenes.
In contemporary times, there has been a drive toward looking at architecture as a trial of power, and trying to reassess. But what is really fascinating to me is, when we're looking at the historical case studies, they are really not problematized within the institutions themselves. This is why all of my projects are actually really performative. Gaining access is about playing a “double game”: the idea is to—as an artistic practice—step into a dialog with the ultimate state or transnational authorities, then choreograph an action with them within these spaces.
The Gift was the first artistic production allowed in the United Nations [Headquarters] in Geneva. Not only that, but there were also a number of archives that I found that nobody was really paying attention to. For example, they have this amazing archive of donations of the [proposed] flag and song of the League of Nations, and they were basically never chosen because they were so scared of nationalism in design and music. But there are these repositories of unwanted gifts, hymns and marches, that were sent to the palace.
The Gift, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
There are all of these metaphors of historical readymades, which I think really resonate today. Artistic research is a metaphorical application of historical readymades. And when you look at these spaces again, after the evacuation of the primary client— in terms of The Gift, the former Palace of Culture and Science paradoxically continues to function after the collapse of its original function. It’s extremely interesting to look at the afterlife of [these spaces]. Often something doesn't correspond anymore to the new political narrative. Usually, the new patriarchy wants to tear it down. But we [artists] are trying to reassess. How can we go forward without necessarily knocking everything down? How can we bring out what is really at the heart of the problem?
But it's pretty dire. You still have, for example, the gift from Belgium, which is this tapestry from the 1930s that depicts eight women, who supposedly represent the people of the world. The European ones are clothed, and the non-European ones are topless. And you go, hang on a minute, we need to relocate this. But of course, in a Maussian sense, a gift cannot be returned; and also the way the United Nations was accepting the gifts made it impossible to return them.
There was a study by Kings College on the problem with soft power is that it was always bilateral. Because multilateral soft power, of course, is very complicated, because you kind of have so many partners, it's very difficult to feed everybody. But it kind of feels that also in cultural diplomacy, it just, they just somehow don't know how to deal with it.
I guess that's why I'm so sensitive to it—because we never have a market, and we still don't have it; we have artistic practices. And cultural export has always been piggybacked on this front of cultural diplomacy and this geopolitic exoticism of Eastern Europe.
And also, on the other hand, we don't really have proper side channels. We don't have the Mondriaan Fund. We don't have the Goethe-Institut. So our embassies have very little money. They can't really support artists when they do work anywhere else, which makes it more difficult to operate on the international stage.
So this is where I've been coming in. But I also didn't want to be working exclusively with Yugoslav and Eastern European heritage, which is why I went more into transnationalism, because that's basically what Yugoslavia was: it was one of the earliest attempts of transnationalism in European space, through the Non-Aligned, where it was the only European state. The Non-Aligned was extremely powerful.
EFJ: Throughout your work, the female body structures narratives of soft power, both symbolically/aesthetically and in terms of reproductive labor. In The Gift, it is three young girls ascending the diving platforms of the Palace of Youth swimming pool that set the scene. This made me think about the outsized presence of prepubescent girls’ bodies in the realm of culture as symbols/harbingers of national identity and power—Olympic (women) gymnasts, for instance, who in the past few decades have usually been children, seem to take on this almost mythological status. Why do you think this is? What significance do the three girls hold in The Gift?
This work was done through the pandemic. My daughter was around the age of the girls [in the opening scene of The Gift] at that time. If you remember, during the pandemic, there was this total kidnapping of the idea of youth for political reasons—with the school lockdowns, with how kids were treated, with the spotlight on the mental health of young people. This idea of the “bright future” became so politicized once again.
The depiction of the young girl, or prepubescent girl, has been the carrier in every single totalitarian, patriarchal society. And that seemed to be coming back. Within this project in particular, the three girls are actually the daughters of the three “gifts,” and they look a little bit like them. But also what I wanted to do is ask: How do we regroup? How do we tend to our young women who are bearers of our futures?
And also, this was the time when, [for instance, the leaders of] Hungary and Croatia were really instrumentalizing women's bodies in terms of their [ability to bear] children. There were these huge campaigns, they were monsters—in Croatia, there were big posters saying, “What kind of a Croatian mother are you?” This was all intended to [confront] the fact that there were a lot of parents sending their kids out [of the country] to study, if they could afford to. So the state was paying for their education, and then they were sent out to get their degrees, and then they stayed abroad. They are not “serving the country.”
And in Hungary, they're actually giving extreme benefits to women who have more than three children. It's really quite insane. It’s a reinvention of these fascist approaches to the female body and its instrumentalization—and how early can it start?
Tourists Welcome (I Feel Love), 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
EFJ: There’s a lot of “political theater” currently unfolding, in which the halls of power themselves, as well as media spectacle, seem to be key players. How is your practice currently positioned in relation to stagecraft and statecraft?
It always varies, because my practice is driven by the idea that the medium is always different. It could be a collage, it could be a film. It’s about having access—that's actually why I started doing film. Because the whole point was that I wanted to bring in an action, a poetic action—absurdity, really—into a space of ultimate control.
I actually started doing projects within airports. I was bringing the [State] Police Orchestra [of the Republic of Slovenia] into the international terminals at the airport, really playing with the systems, on codes of messaging. In terms of access, I don’t always [get permission to use these spaces], obviously, but if the access is refused, I try to find different ways of making the idea resonate.
Recently, I've been working with human rights advocacy. One of my last projects was a photographic series, at the end of the day. I was working with judges from the International Court of Justice [and other human rights and international law tribunals] and asking them to each nominate a flower that would be a part of an arrangement that would be positioned on a table where what they consider to be the most urgent human right violations would be discussed. So it was a way of reaching out to all these individuals and giving them this space for their own personal messaging. And then I built these flower arrangements that were created as vanitas, with bugs and beetles and scorpions and flowers.
But it was that time when we were all waiting for the Hamas verdict. It was also when we were realizing that all of these international courts are failing because of politics. Initially I actually wanted to make a film within those spaces, but that became quite difficult. [My work] is about putting myself in dialogue with these spaces, then testing what is possible, figuring out where we are in time.
The Arrangement, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
EFJ: I recently attended a talk at e-flux by Olga Touloumi, who spoke about your work in conjunction with Charm Offensive at Brief Histories. She discussed her book Assembly by Design examining how the UN’s global interiors were designed to exude an idealized fiction of egalitarianism, and ended by stating that the spectacle in the Oval Office made it clear that we are entering a new period of destabilization. Do you agree? What is the role, or potential role, of artists in shaping whatever comes next?
JC: My worry really is what artists will turn to in order to survive. Recently I've been looking at the German situation in the 1930s, and what was happening with this bottleneck there. It was very specifically targeted, for example, much more against visual artists, whereas actors and theater were left a bit more alone. So then you have people not necessarily being traitors, but [comprising] because they need to survive.
Because we [artists] are interested in people, we think about solidarity, we think about ethics. But I've started noticing that the word “solidarity” has become just a word on paper, and that really fills me with fear. Also, there's a big loss of multiple discourses. Again, because I'm coming from Yugoslavia, I may be a bit more prone to seeing this happening. [For instance], if you can get funding to do a project about X but not Y, then of course everyone’s doing projects about X—but what about Y? And this is where I do think that we do need institutions with more guts.
I am really interested in bringing people together who otherwise wouldn't work together. A lot of colleagues of mine are turning to hibernation, in a way, because they're refusing to say “yes” to things that they politically disagree with. So there's also been a lot of censorship of who you work with, because there’s a lot of dirty money.
And I think that, back to Olga, whenever there's a schism, there’s also a big opportunity to reinvent. And I think—I mean, I look at my daughter and her friends who want to go into the creative sector. For sure, they will need to reinvent. And you know, it might be that art becomes something we [haven’t even thought of] yet.
We ourselves need to build resilience before we get burned out. It's a very tense time—I look at the students around here, and they're full of anxiety. We need to have modes of experimentation. When I'm talking with my friends who were working in the UK in the 80s, for example, you could survive on very little, you could squat. And there was this amazing abundance of creativity. I have loads of friends who work in that area and in that age—the mid-to-late 60s, and they're still so full of their life and revolutionary thought. And then I look at my students who are 20, 21 . . .
The Gift, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
EFJ: What are you working on now?
JC: I am working on a bigger project that requires quite a lot of heavy lifting in terms of access. So it's been a slower attempt to make something. I’ve had to navigate quite carefully in terms of gathering the right partners and investors. It has required me to change my way of working.
And then I'm doing a solo show in Northern Ireland at Void Art Centre with this amazing woman, Viviana [Checchia], who is the director there. We're working on a new project looking at the ["Josip Broz Tito" Art] Gallery of the Non-Aligned [Countries] in Montenegro, which I’ve done work with before. I'm basically working with sculptures of female busts and bodies that were donated by men—of course—to this idea of transnational solidarity, and they're all from spaces that have been before the cultural sphere has been annihilated, and I'm connecting them through a series of explosions. It's much more of a video work, actually, but it's a looped series of explosions and implosions, where from one explosion, a new object appears. This idea of continuous reinvention of the mother and the impossibility of its destruction. So it's a really kind of minimal work, but very complex.
I'm also working with the tears of human rights lawyers. We're creating planetary constructions [with them], because then the tears under the microscope look like terrain. So I've been working for the last six months trying to make the UN cry and collecting their tears.
It's a lot about ritual, a lot about going back to the roots of what art is, and how I consider my practice as a ritual for myself, for my community, for my daughter. How can I find it still generative? A lot of times I feel like it doesn’t do what I thought I could do—change the world. But it's been amazing, actually, like working with human rights. I must say it's been really humbling and beautiful.
I have a friend who's the head of the team [fighting for the release of] Jimmy Lai. At the moment, she's being targeted by the Chinese state. The resilience that these women [who I work with] show is just incredible. I have another colleague who's the youngest judge at the ICT [International Trade Commission] in Slovenia. She's the one who took over from one of the one of the ladies that gave up working on the Netanyahu case.
So I've been reaching out to women who are on the front lines, but nobody really knows about them. And that's where I find it really insane. You know—who builds the front pages of our newspapers? And who does the real, actual heavy lifting to ensure that the world will still exist tomorrow?
Brief Histories presented Charm Offensive by Jasmina Cibic from December 12, 2024 to January 11, 2025.
