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Jasmina Cibic

Nada: Act II

Film expérimental | 4k | couleur | 13:1 | Slovénie, Royaume-Uni | 0

NADA: Act II restages a reimagined performance of Béla Bartók’s pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin - as performed inside the Yugoslav Pavilion at the Brussels EXPO in 1958. With its scope to represent the country’s new aesthetic direction on Nations Day almost sixty years ago, the ballet score is here traced through scarce archives and re-invented and overwritten with new purpose in collaboration with the choreographer Lea Anderson. Based on a story by Melchior Lengyel, The Miraculous Mandarin constituted a peculiar choice for the National Day given that it possessed something of a scandalous reputation owing to its prurient narrative: three pimps make use of a prostitute to lure passing men into a room with the intention of robbing them. The titular Mandarin arrives, doomed to be the next victim. His « miraculousness » stems from his ability to withstand beating, suffocation, and stabbing without perishing, persisting always in his lust for the woman. Finally, she embraces him and he dies, sated. Bartók’s original characters, the pimps, prostitute and exotic Mandarin are replaced with the archetypes of politicians, the ideal of Mother Nation, and that most easily abused of Modern practitioners: the Architect. In doing so, the ballet becomes an allegorical proposition through which to view European history: the thugs cast as the state’s bureaucrats and politicos, who deceive and enslave, destroying the desires of those who produce for the benefit of the nation or artistic idealism. Shot in the iconic Arne Jacobsen’s Aarhus City Hall NADA: Act II links across time and space various European models of statecraft, soft power and its framing.

Jasmina Cibic (b. Ljubljana 1979) is a London based artist who works in performance, installation and film, employing a range of activity, media and theatrical tactics to redefine or reconsider a specific ideological formation and its framing devices such as art and architecture. Her work draws a parallel between the construction of national culture and its use value for political aims, encouraging the viewer to consider the timelessness of psychological and soft power mechanisms that authoritarian structures utilise in their own reinsertion and reinvention. Jasmina represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project « For Our Economy and Culture ».