This summer at Void Art Centre we are delighted to welcome Jasmina Cibic to Void Art Centre.
The Gift Ecology, Jasmina’s first solo show in Ireland, launches on Saturday 21st June, 6-8pm and continues until 13th September 2025.
Jasmina Cibic’s The Gift Ecology continues the artist’s exploration of the anthropological concept of the gift and its inherent obligations of circulation and reciprocity, as succinctly described by Marcel Mauss in his seminal essay The Gift. At Void Art Centre, Cibic focuses on the extractivism of both nature and culture within the history of political gifting—particularly gifts that supported the construction of transnational spheres of influence through soft power strategies.
The Gift Ecology presents a new body of work spanning video installation, photography, and sculpture. These works converge in restoring agency to art objects, animals, and plants once gifted in the name of the nation. In Cibic’s installation, human and non-human actors come together as storytellers, proposing a shared politics of mutualism, collaboration, justice, and care.
A series within the exhibition, also titled The Gift Ecology, features photographs of Yugoslav government documents detailing the exchange of animals and the ritualistic functions these gifts served in constructing a new transnational political space during the Cold War—namely, the Non-Aligned Movement. This forum of developing and largely postcolonial states proposed a “third way”of governance, resisting the polarisation of the world between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Cibic overlays these archival images with white pencil, erasing the surrounding geographical landscapes and directing the viewer’s attention solely to the animals’ portraits and the diplomatic gaze their presentation once served. As many of the countries—and the multilateral alignments these animals were meant to represent—fracture and dissolve, the obligation of reciprocity tethered to these gifts dissipates. The animals, once symbols of soft power, are reframed as agents, inhabiting the ruins of colonial and ideological structures. In this context, The Gift Ecology invites us to see animals as a living archive of ongoing extractivist methods of cultural diplomacy – even within the building of the postcolonial transnational space.
Mothers (2025), a new video work, was created within the context of the archive of the Gallery of the Non-Aligned—the only institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting artworks gifted by heads of state, ambassadors, and cultural elites of the Non-Aligned Movement. From this archive, Cibic selected only sculptures depicting female heads, busts, and figures—representations of emergent mother nations. Chosen by predominantly male government officials and created by male artists, these sculptures stand in as allegorical mother nations, representing countries whose cultural capital has consistently been obfuscated, exoticised, and/or destroyed by Western powers. In the video, these sculptures are linked through a sequence of explosions, transforming them into ciphers of ancestral urgency—a matriarchal warning system spanning territories and timelines. Illuminated like precious jewels and rotating slowly as if in a storefront display, the sculptures develop cracks that exponentially accumulate until the objects ultimately disintegrate into dust and debris, only to re-emerge as a new sculptural configuration. These too are female forms, mothers shaped by different cultural and political contexts. This cyclical eternal transformation underlines the necessity of the enduring process of resilience-building, where symbolic collapse becomes the ground for reinvention.
The accompanying soundscape merges ASMR-inspired textures—highlighting the contemporary voyeuristic pleasures derived from destruction—with a female narrator voicing words of resistance and strategies for survival, drawn from archival debates on cultural sovereignty and self-determination.
The final component of the exhibition is a collaborative project with United Nations human rights advocates. The UN, as the symbolic parent of the Non-Aligned Movement, was the setting where the term “Non-Alignment” was first introduced by India and Yugoslavia in 1950 in relation to the Korean War. For this work, Cibic invited members of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies to donate their tears, which she then photographed under a microscope. Resembling planetary terrains, these images are transferred onto brass plates. At first glance resembling celestial bodies, the works confront viewers with the fragile terrain of human rights advocacy within the erosion of international law. They serve as a speculative invitation to imagine a more just world—even as a parallel universe built from the potential futures of the past.
The exhibition culminates in a suspended bronze globe featuring fictional islands, continents, and waterways—all derived from the microscopic tear photographs. Cast in bronze—a material historically bound to patriarchal symbols of power—the rotating globe suggests a reversal of the extractivist gaze employed by hegemonic systems in the production of patriarchial spectacle. The sculpture becomes an illusionist device, hinting at new planetary imaginaries born from care, resilience, and restitution.
Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition at Void Art Centre addresses both historical and contemporary contexts of self-determination and cultural emancipation. Through its layered installations, the exhibition reflects on the extractivism of nature and culture as tools of nation-building. It interrogates our present-day fascination with ruins, the exoticisation of indigeneity in post-collapse cultural movements, and asks: What role can art and culture play within dissolved systems of solidarity – and care and how might they help us imagine new forms of agency?
Void Art Centre opens Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 5pm.
Please email hello@derryvoid.com for accessibility needs.
photo: Mother (2025), video still, courtesy of the artist
