Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 30 January – 8 March 2015

Photo: Tamás Bujnovszky

Acting as a synthesis of the artist’s past conceptual and formal investigations, the Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic’s new video installation and project Spielraum: The Nation Loves It, presents the first chapter of the project Spielraum, which will be followed by two subsequent chapters that will be presented at MGLC Ljubljana and the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (MSUB) later this year. This new body of work was preceded by Cibic’s critically acclaimed project For Our Economy and Culture made for the Slovenian Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennial.
The exhibition title references the writing of one of the first European political satirical writers: Karl Kraus. In his essay Spielraum (1912), Kraus vehemently opposes the use of decoration in both language and architecture. Cibic connects Kraus with the phenomena of programmatic application of decoration by practically every (trans)national political structure within language and the built environment. Through film, performance, sculpture, and installation, Jasmina Cibic’s Gesamtkunstwerk explores the instrumentalisation of visual language and rhetoric in the construction of the State as spectacle throughout recent history and investigates modes of how art and architecture serve as soft power strategies of every political order.
Spielraum – The Nation Loves It is composed of an immersive installation, performances, a sound-score for the installation by Simon Fisher Turner and two film projections. The scenography of the exhibition departs from the plans and designs for the hosting of the first conference of the Non-aligned movement that took place in Belgrade in 1961. This conference was a significant meeting of global states without any alignment to major power blocks. The challenge for this city at that time was to re-define and re-design the environment for presentation to the foreign delegates attending the conference whilst simultaneously re-branding the city to its citizens. The works in Spielraum: The Nation Loves It re-configure the visual elements contained in the sketches, plans and drawings for the city with its unique pavilions, monuments and decorative additions with specific reference to the interior design of the monumental former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade, a major conference site.