Jasmina Cibic: Everything That You Desire and Nothing That You Fear

Last summer, Montreal celebrated the 50th anniversary of Expo 67, a monumental event that put the city at the centre of the international stage. Jasmina Cibic’s latest project—created expressly for the Foundation’s exhibition spaces and the Montreal milieu—is an immersive installation that explores the production of national culture and its instrumentalization for political aims in the context of 20th Century World Expositions. The exhibition’s title, Everything That You Desire and Nothing That You Fear, is drawn from political discussions and agreements in the planning stages of Expo 67 about what each country should show to the international audience.

Expo 67 was also the last international exhibition at which the former Yugoslavia had a pavilion prior to its dissolution in the 1990s—its final act of staging where the country presented, each time under a different name, at four political blockbuster World Expositions: 1929 Barcelona, 1937 Paris, 1958 Brussels, and 1967 Montreal.

Yugoslavia’s renaming—and finally its disappearance—becomes a lens through which Cibic studies the aesthetic permutations within art and architecture as “soft power” and statecraft strategies used to achieve the ultimate display of dominance for international audiences. How are a state’s interests and rhetoric deployed through art and architecture to shape public perception of a place? How do governments instrumentalize culture for the formation of national identity and representation? Cibic’s artistic methodology involves archival research and collaboration with a variety of specialists, through which she creates sumptuous Gesamtkunstwerks (total works of art) that combine the potencies of installation, sculpture, photography, performance and film. The overall effect simultaneously captivates the visitor and reveals constructs that are fashioned and implemented by governments for hegemonic control.

Cibic will make conceptual use of the Foundation’s two very different buildings to draw comparisons and underscore tensions between the spaces of state-sanctioned public structures (which are often inaccessible) and the private space of the home where the ghost-like machine of state politics permeates.

Within her works, Cibic brings together a range of strategies including scripting, enacting and re-enacting to draw connections between “statecraft” and stagecraft. Through a critical, feminist unpacking of the complex entanglements of art, gender and state power, the artist encourages viewers to consider the strategies employed in the construction of national culture. Cibic’s proposal is especially pertinent in our current situation of increasing nationalist fervour around the world, and poignantly resonant in the Canadian context where a sense of national identity is in constant flux.

Everything That You Desire and Nothing That You Fear is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.