NADA

This first act of Jasmina Cibic's new project fans out from a biographical thread, that of the complex figure of Vjenceslav Richter. Croatian architect and artist Richter was one the key architects taking care of the former Yugoslavia’s Nation State representation – having designed both of the Yugoslav pavilions for the only world expositions after WW2 that the country participated at, as well as the Zagreb villa Zagorje that served the former Yugoslav president Tito.

Cibic translates Richter's architecture into a character within a rhizomatic narrative about the methodologies of the construction of Yugoslav national identity and its relation to the idea of aesthetics as the gatekeeper for the presentation of a political system to the international community of spectators, headed by diplomacy and leading politicians. 

In her project Nada, Cibic heavily leans on the idea of the pleasure principle and focuses on the concurrent and parallel positions of female presence surrounding the architect who’s role was to find a suitable pedestal and frame for Nation state: his client (the State itself, his wife Nada, an actress who followed him throughout his world travels, and his four anti-gravitational sculptures of the same name that he created as a response to the censorship of his core artistic thought by the leading state ideologue Edvard Kardelj).
Nada, meaning “hope” in Croatian language, choses for its first act Richter’s censored design for the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 EXPO in Brussels, which the artist recreates as a musical instrument on which a violinist will perform the composition chosen to be the inaugural and hence most representative soundtrack of the State.