Jasmina Cibic “Fruits of our Land”
LMAKgallery
This event has ended.
LMAKprojects presents Jasmina Cibic’s first solo show in the United States Fruits of our Land. It features a film, of the same title, that was shot specifically for For our Economy and Culture, the artist’s solo project for the Slovenian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial (produced by Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana and Skuc Gallery). The exhibition will assimilate elements from Cibic’s installation presented in Venice in 2013 and offer a full immersion into the narrative, as the space will be transformed through wallpaper along with new photographic works.
Jasmina Cibic proposes the re-visitation of her site and context specific work as an installation literally cut out from its initial presentation. She purposefully plays further with the notions of what it means to be a national representative artist on foreign ground. Through the introduction on a ‘new’ platform, the installation questions and re-interprets the relation between artistic language and the parameters of its national identity. The film Fruits of our Land, which will be shown in the back of the gallery, explores issues around national representation and is a recreation of a 1957 parliamentary debate between politicians, architects and art historians, set up to decide which artworks might be suitable to ‘decorate’ the newly built People’s Assembly. The result is a recreation of the absurdity of bureaucracy, while at the same time investigating the passionate views of representation and nationalism that seems to rest in any nation and its people.
As a further framing device, the interior of the gallery will be entirely covered with wallpaper carrying obsessively repetitive scientific illustrations of an endemic Slovene beetle, a ‘failed’ national icon that has been almost completely exorcised solely because of its ideologically charged name, Anophthalmus hitleri, given to it by a Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s. The insect underlines the discussion of nationalism and its symbols, as it marks an un-erasable ideological moment - its name can according to the Linne classification never be changed.
Cibic’s photographic work is installed in the front gallery on top of the wallpaper. The photographs present a staged view of the archetypal characters drawn from the film: the politician, the art historian and the architect interacting with the architectural model of the People’s Assembly: a building, a statement or a functional object.
The exhibit is made possible in part with the generous support of the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Washington and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
Slovenian-born, London-based artist Jasmina Cibic (b.1979) graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy in 2003 and completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London in 2006. Her recent projects and exhibitions include the Slovenian pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial; Musée national d’histoire et d’art, Luxembourg; Ernst Museum, Budapest; La Gaité Lyrique, Paris; 3oth International Graphics Biennial Ljubljana; October Salon, Belgrade, “U3 - 7th Triennial of Contemporary Art”, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana; Dokfest Kulturbahnhof Kassel; Joanneum Museum Graz; Mestna galerija Ljubljana; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana; Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana; Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor; Five Years Gallery, London; Ljubljana International Airport and Künstlerhaus Graz.
[Image: Jasmina Cibic Fruits of Our Land, 2013 wallpaper detail]
Media
Schedule
from April 10, 2014 to May 11, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-04-10 from 18:00 to 21:00