About the Commission: For our Economy and Culture

Using the architectural specificity of the Slovenian Pavilion, a repurposed private residence, and referencing state architectural strategies, Cibic will create an immersive multi-media installation that appropriates the entire space and explores issues around national representation and framing. 

Into this context, Cibic places a variety of elements, which further examine modes of exchange, reception and constructions of identity. These include two films, shot on official state locations, which underwent numerous redesigns concurrent with national cultural and political imperatives. 

The films present philosophical and architectural theories of purpose, form, function and aesthetic priorities through, in one, a staged interview between a (male) architect and (female) journalist, and in the other, a recreation of a 1957 parliamentary debate set up to decide which artworks might be suitable (i.e. nationally representative enough) to ‘decorate’ the newly built People’s Assembly. In each film, the re-imagining and recontextualising of such issues, dramatizes not only the power paradigms inherent in systems of authority, but also the explicit contradictions present in the transmutation of a national identity from past to present, place to place. 

Images: Jasmina Cibic, Framing the Space, 2013, stills, photography: Pete Moss, ©Jasmina Cibic, courtesy of the artist and Škuc Gallery.