http://jasminacibic.org/projects/nada-act-1/
The first act of Jasmina Cibic’s new project “Nada” fans out from a
biographical thread of architect and artist Vjenceslav Richter whose
archive is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb’s collection.
As an architect, Richter was one of the key figures in charge of the
artistic and visual representation of the Yugoslav pavilions at world
expositions. He designed national pavilions for two world exhibitions in
which Yugoslavia participated after the World War II. He was also the
co-designer of the Zagorje villa in Zagreb, which was built for the
former Yugoslav president Tito and is now the official residence of the
Croatian President.
Cibic translates Richter’s architecture into a character within a
rhizomatic narrative about the methodologies of the construction of
Yugoslav identity and its relation to the idea of aesthetics as the
gatekeeper of the presentation of a political system to the
international community of spectators, headed by diplomacy and leading
politicians. Heavily leaning on the ideaof the pleasure principle, Cibic
focuses on the concurrent and parallel positions of female presence
surrounding the architect, who had been chosen to invent an adequate
frame to present the State’s spectacle. These female figures were
primarily the State itself – his client, his wife Nada – an actress who
followed him throughout his world travels, and his three
anti-gravitational sculptures of the same name created as a response to
the censorship of his core artistic thought, which was, according to
archival sources, imposed on him by the leading state ideologue Edvard
Kardelj.
The central element of project
Nada is Richter’s first, but
unrealized design for the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 EXPO in
Brussels. Cibic appropriates and recreates the pavilion as a sculpture,
whichin turnfunctions as the skeleton of her new short film, around
which the exhibition is centered.
In the single channel video installation, violinist Dejana Sekulić continually tunes the architecture according to the
Miraculous Mandarin,
a musical composition for ballet by Béla Bartók which was chosen to
represent Yugoslavia at the most important dates of the pavilion – its
National Days – whose role was to maximise the attention and the number
of visitors. The fact that the Yugoslav state chose the Bartók ballet as
its representative moment is in itself intriguing since the ballet had
been repeatedly banned by numerous political systems due to its explicit
subject matter – the conflict between a prostitute and her pimp and
clients.
Alongside the single channel video installation, which will be shown
in Richter Collection, Jasmina Cibic’s installation also presents a
series of collages. They take the form of a study for costume design and
scenography for the second act of Nada, which will present a recreation
of the original 1958 Mandarin ballet performance in the Yugoslav
Pavilion at the Brussels EXPO. The series presents portraits of a dancer
wearing recreated costumes whilst re-enacting poses drawn from
art-historical representations of various female Nation State
allegories. Through these allegorical representations , the work alludes
to the psychological mechanisms that power structures utilize
throughout their conception and maintenance of their spectacle.
