The Pavilion (2015)

A part of the Performing the Museum project, curated by Andreja Hribernik.
The Pavilion (2015) documents a group of performers as they assemble a scale model of the lost pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia built for the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition.
A female voice-over delivers a description of the artist’s research methods, both retracing the temporary structure from archival evidence as well as filling in the gaps by drawing upon other case studies which share the striking black and white striped façade of the Yugoslav Pavilion, such as the Adolf Loos house for Josephine Baker and the British navy fleet camouflage.

In The Pavilion (2015), Cibic examines the methods, which produce a turn of historical subjects into discursive fetishes of the contemporary condition - where the gaze of the spectator mostly remains on their outer skin. By literally slicing specific historical subjects - architecture and design case-studies of a specific aesthetic that served one of the early 20th Century’s patriarchal political display mechanisms – the artist addresses the geo-political fetishism that continues to be permanently produced and show how the reapropriation of historical subjects may point to the repetition of the very same methods of control which enhance soft power mechanisms of dominant political structures.