Jasmina Cibic
Jasmina Cibic is a Slovenian artist and filmmaker whose work spans film, installation, performance and sculpture. She explores how states use culture, architecture and the language of display as instruments of "soft power", focusing on the construction of national identities and the entanglement of art, gender and state politics. She represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale with the pavilion project For Our Economy and Culture and won the Film London Jarman Award in 2021 for her film The Gift.
Early life and education
Cibic was born in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, in 1979. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice before completing a Master of Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006. She later settled in London, while maintaining close ties to artistic communities in Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe.Work and themes
Across film, performance and large-scale installation, Cibic examines how political rhetoric is staged through architecture, decoration, ceremony and cultural patronage. Drawing on archival research and historical case studies, she often reworks speeches, diplomatic correspondence and planning documents into scripts performed by actors, dancers and musicians. Her projects frequently take place in emblematic sites such as former parliament buildings, expo pavilions and modernist cultural palaces, treated as sets in a broader investigation of statecraft and spectacle.Cibic’s exhibitions are often conceived as immersive, theatrical environments in which films, sculptures, textiles and architectural elements form a single narrative installation. Critics have noted her interest in the aesthetics of diplomacy and propaganda, and her use of allegory to reflect on Europe’s recurring identity crises.
Major projects
For Our Economy and Culture
Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with the pavilion project For Our Economy and Culture. The work explored how art and architecture were mobilised to project Yugoslav and Slovenian state identities, including through decorative schemes in parliamentary spaces and Tito-era diplomatic residences. The pavilion combined installations, wall coverings and films staged in historically charged interiors such as the former residence at Lake Bled.Nada and Everything That You Desire and Nothing That You Fear
Between 2014 and 2017 Cibic produced the film trilogy Nada, which examines music, architecture and dance commissioned for nation-branding during moments of political crisis in twentieth-century Europe. The trilogy, co-commissioned by Aarhus 2017, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Kunstmuseen Krefeld, has been shown in installations that extend its scenography into the gallery space.In 2018–19 the PHI Foundation in Montreal presented Everything That You Desire and Nothing That You Fear, an exhibition that re-imagined Yugoslavia’s world’s fair pavilions through films, textiles and archival material, using Expo 67 as a lens on state-sponsored cultural display.
The Gift
From 2019 to 2021 Cibic developed The Gift, a three-channel film and installation that considers the politics of cultural gifts offered between states and international organisations. The film stages an allegorical competition between an artist, a diplomat and an engineer to determine which cultural offering might heal a divided society, drawing on historical examples of gifted buildings, artworks and performances.The Gift premiered in 2021, screening at venues including the BFI London Film Festival and the Barbican in London, and was central to Cibic’s receipt of the 2021 Film London Jarman Award.
Recent projects
In the mid-2020s Cibic extended her research into gift economies, care and memory through projects such as The Gift Ecology, which brought together video, photography and sculpture around the afterlives of artworks, animals and plants donated in the name of the nation, and the exhibition Charm Offensive at Brief Histories, New York, in 2024–25.Exhibitions
Cibic has held solo exhibitions at institutions including Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, Museum Sztuki in Łódź, MSUM Ljubljana, CCA Glasgow, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Esker Foundation in Calgary, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MGLC Ljubljana and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.Her work has also featured in group exhibitions and biennials at venues such as MoMA, New York; IMMA, Dublin; the Chicago Architecture Biennial; MAXXI, Rome; Biennale Jogja; Innsbruck Biennial; and the Guangdong Museum of Art, among others.
Awards
Cibic has received numerous awards and nominations. In addition to winning the Film London Jarman Award in 2021, she received the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image Award in 2020 and shared the MAC International Ulster Bank and Charlottenborg Fonden prizes in 2016. Her work with moving image has been recognised by the Aesthetica Film Festival, where she won Best Artist’s Film in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize.She had previously been shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2018.