[artinfo] Tear Down and Rebuild, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

[jasmina cibic]

Watch the trailer of Jasmina Cibic's new film online:
Tear Down and Rebuild (2015)
<http://jasminacibic.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=23842caf92d4a74b5ca793ef5&id=3e3b3179ba&e=bbc7bb5db1>click 
here


MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART BELGRADE

Jasmina Cibic: Tear Down and Rebuild 
solo exhibition
curated by Una Popoviç
September 11th - October 25th 2015

The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade is proud 
to present the artist's first institutional solo 
exhibition in Serbia. Jasmina Cibic's work 
explores histories of ideological formations, 
which she addresses with site and context 
specific installations, performance and film. By 
traversing different structures and systems, the 
artist creates projects that often feel like 
Gesamtkunstwerke within which she re-works found 
ready-mades spanning from language, architecture 
to historical events. These form components of a 
theatrical stage and speak of their place of 
origin infused with a variable effective 
half-life, charged with former ideologies that 
only slowly over time can cool down. Jasmina 
Cibic investigates these properties outside of 
their usual habitat and aside from their physical 
reality as communicative mediums that are charged 
(and recharged) with meaning and political 
programmatic.

The artist's new project for the Museum of 
Contemporary Art Belgrade presents the third 
chapter of the artist's series Spielraum 
(initiated at Ludwig Museum Budapest and MGLC 
Ljubljana earlier this year) which questions the 
potential of instrumentalization of visual 
language, rhetoric and architecture in the 
construction of the State as spectacle throughout 
recent history and investigates how art and 
architecture can serve as soft power strategies 
of every political order.

Cibic's new film features an all-female cast and 
frames its four characters (a Nation Builder, a 
Pragmatist, a Conservationist and an 
Artist/Architect) as an extension of the 
architecture and its fittings - formally 
completing the empty stage, as sculptures rising 
from the scenographic background, the 
architecture itself. The film's dialogue is 
composed from quotes drawn from various political 
speeches, debates and proclamations on iconoclasm 
of architecture, art and monuments; the language 
that endorsed demolition and redesign, which was 
to aid the creation of new displays for ensuing 
nation-states or ideological positions throughout 
the 20th and 21st centuries. The sources for the 
script include amongst others: Regan's speech on 
the Berlin Wall, Prince Charles's 1984 address at 
RIBA and Isis bloggers' proclamation on the 
demolishment of temples. As the film's narrative 
unfolds, the viewer is a witness to the final 
decision to demolish the fictitious building, the 
image of which is constructed in the spectator's 
imagination through a collage of quotations on 
diverse, ideologically contrived and historically 
charged buildings, monuments, walls etc. that 
were to be or were knocked down - pointing to the 
universality and timelessness of the paradox of 
national and ideological representation and its 
icons.

Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art
Pari”ka 14, Belgrade, Serbia
opening times: every day 12.00  - 20.00 except Tuesday
Media enquiries and images, please contact: 
<mailto:nikica at msub.org.rs>nikica at msub.org.rs