Cibic's NADA trilogy examines three of European modernism’s star architects and the role their work played in national representation. The starting point for Act I is Vjenceslav Richter and the Yugoslav pavilion he designed for the Brussels World Exhibition in 1958. Act II takes place in Arne Jacobsen’s Aarhus City Hall (1937-1942), whilst the third act is placed within Haus Lange and Haus Esters designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Krefeld, Germany for the silk barons that were instrumental in affirming silk as the new national export within the pre-WW2 European soft power game. In the third chapter of NADA Cibic addresses van der Rohe’s Krefeld architecture of the 1920s through the lens of the political discussions concerning the aesthetic choices for the representation of Germany at world fairs of mid 20th Century.
NADA Act III: The Exhibition was commissioned specifically for the artist’s exhibition at House Esters by Kunstmuseen Krefeld that included an immersive installation developed within the vila. The script for the film is assembled from archival transcripts, political discussions, reports and personal letters surrounding Germany’s presentations at world expositions in 1929, 1937 and 1958 and their legacy. Cibic devises the script into three positions: the Artist, the Curator and Germania engage in a discussion about the aesthetics and style of the artworks and architecture that should be exhibited at an undisclosed event of national interest in order to ensure international success. Whilst engaging in the discussion, the women work on the artefacts and their display within a set specifically built in House Lange encompassing mainly two styles: that of figurative representation and that of an abstract positioning. They are sculpting, polishing, curating and destroying physical manifestations of their words, shifting their position of picturesque allegories into an active political stance. Their scripted sentences combine diverse ideological positions through time and space pointing to the universal code of merging life and art in a service to the state in order to affect society. What can we learn from the history’s more sinister accounts of this most awkward relationship is one among many questions Cibic’s work raises through its tireless and variegated archaeologies.
