Jasmina Cibic. Charm Offensive

About

Charm Offensive highlights culture’s position in political diplomacy and the use of art in nation building, investigating culture’s role as a political style-bearer and a Trojan horse for covert diplomacy and political interests. Featuring the film The Gift (2021) and a selection of drawings from the series, Charm Offensive (2022), the works in the exhibition cut into the intersections of cultural and political gifting, and the manipulation of natural and social systems for political gain.

Cibic, an artist acclaimed for her multidisciplinary approach—spanning film, performance and installation—interrogates sites of culture in the service of statecraft and ideological agendas. Her work critically examines how diverse forces in culture from architecture, art, and botany have been co-opted to shape political narratives and reinforce systems of power. The Gift, an enigmatic, sonically driven film, explores the idea of gifting as essential to national identity formation and its entwinements with artistic production. The film addresses the concept of a political gift—a donation of artistic, architectural, political or philosophical thought—to national and ideological structures. Filmed within iconic architectural landmarks including Oscar Niemeyer's French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, the Palais of the Nations in Geneva, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw and Mount Buzludzha Bulgaria—each a political gift in its own right—three men (an artist, a diplomat, and an engineer) compete to create the perfect gift to the world. As their ideas are judged by allegorical figures of texts and ideologies, and through meticulous cinematography and dialogue sourced from historical archives, The Gift illustrates the ways cultural and architectural symbols are weaponized in the pursuit of soft power.

In Charm Offensive, Cibic explores the political implications of the “gifting” of names within Carl Linnaeus's taxonomy system—a system that prohibits altering names, even when they reference politically contentious figures. Collaborating with international botanical illustrators, Cibic highlights how Linnaean taxonomy erased local knowledge, replacing it with patriarchal and colonial ideologies. By focusing exclusively on Latin names tied to historical figures associated with colonization, she critiques the enduring legacies of colonial power embedded in names that are presented as “natural” within scientific practices. The installation features botanical illustrations that reinterpret these namesakes, alongside a series of engravings of iron fences from botanical gardens—historical sites that functioned as laboratories for the acclimation and exchange of economically valuable plants. The iron bars are inscribed with phrases derived from botany and repurposed by the political and diplomatic context, emphasizing the persistent political servitude of culture and nature to patriarchal systems of power.