Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist — Jasmina Cibic, *The Gift* (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist

One Image by Lillian Davies:

In the early 1950s Stalin erected the Palace of Culture and Science in the center of Warsaw as a gift to the Polish people, newly part of his Soviet Union. There’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside the 42-floor tower, with a diving well and three platform boards. Jasmina Cibic’s three channel 4K video film, The Gift (2021) opens there, with sweeping color images and sounds of chlorinated water trickling through the drains. In her opening shots, three pre-adolescent girls, hair pulled back tight from their pale foreheads, walk one after another along the pool’s tiled edge. They are dressed to perform and to compete, wearing simple one-piece suits, two in navy blue, one in dark red. A stately piano melody and a cool female voice over accompanies them as they climb metal stairs and await one another at the top of the diving platforms. A dive, a front flip, and a pencil shaped plunge, the athletes pierce the calm surface of the crystal-clear water, finger tips first, or toes, at exactly the same moment, amplifying the cutting sound of a splash. Exuding youth, strength and beauty, like Zeus’s three muses, these young women embody ideals that are beyond themselves. Cibic filmed underwater, and seen from below, the moment they break the surface is like the burst of a firecracker, or three. For a split second after their plunge, they are unique, liberated, swimming slowly to the surface and an inevitable panel of judges.

Cibic’s newest film, unfolds primarily in Paris, inside the French Communist Party Headquarters, a gift from architect Oscar Niemeyer. Here, Cibic’s three male characters, “three gifts,” as she calls them, The Engineer, The Diplomat, and the most handsome, The Artist, played by Downtown Abbey’s Lachlan Nieboer, devise a plan: “We will organize a competition to determine the symbol of our renovated future.” And so it is, that each, speaking in turn of the ideological virtues of architecture, music and art, are put into competition to determine the gift that will appease and reunify an unnamed and divided nation.

Four actresses play a cast of allegorical judges, referred to in Cibic’s narrative as the Four Fundamental Freedoms: from Fear, from Want, of Speech and of Worship (terms borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 speech aimed to spur American support for entry into World War II). The characters’ dramatic period hair, makeup and clothes — perfectly matched to Niemeyer’s 1971 construction date — are a contrast to the unadorned sobriety of Cibic’s three divers. Cibic’s judges’ polish and dress are reminders of the workings and power of spectacle, performances of gender, seduction and status, that fuel political debate and public opinion. The judges’ exchange begins as a sort of philosophical debate and quickly disintegrates into a battle of practical nonsense—jargon.

It’s a jargon that sounds like art-speak or International Art English, as named in the brilliant Triple Canopy study, that eerily familiar language drained of meaning through translation, repetition and misunderstanding. Each line of Cibic’s script is ready-made, like her characters and soundtrack for this film, pulled from archives, transcriptions and recordings of politicians and artists speaking about the ideologies behind modern artworks:

“Art itself if a gift of the creative spirit.”

“The artist is a political being: alert.”

“Art is not made to decorate apartments. It is a weapon to be used against the enemy.”

Not only historical ready-mades, each element—script, music and sites—of Cibic’s The Gift was given as such. MAC Lyon curator Mathieu Lelièvre Lelièvre cites the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss whose 1924 essay remains preeminent for studies of gift exchange. For Mauss, gift giving implies a social contract performed in public rituals. There’s a stage, costuming and choreography that Cibic forces us to see. Gift-giving can be a tool of soft power, a political and cultural phenomena she’s been exploring since her exhibition for the Slovenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990, shortly the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Nye, soft power implies “organizing an international agenda and structuring world politics by using resources of intangible power like culture, ideology and institutions.” Mobilizing art for political ends in other words, though sociologist Alexandre Kazerouni warns, in his recent paper, Musées and Soft Power in the Persian Gulf (2015), that Nye’s soft power is not economic power. It is the intellectual and ideological conception of an artwork that matters, not its market value.

Though Cibic doesn’t mention him by name, Lewis Hyde’s eponymous book, first published in 1983, looms large. Hyde wrote as a poet, for other poets, searching for a history and meaning of gift giving, gift having, in a modern society founded on commercial exchange. His subtitle, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, reads like a line of Cibic’s ready-made script. As Margaret Atwood wrote recently in Paris Review, in his book, Hyde seems to be looking for a definition of the nature of art. “Is a work of art a commodity with a money value, to be bought and sold like a potato, or is it a gift on which no real price can be placed, to be freely exchanged?” Atwood asks. She proposes an answer in Hyde’s explorations, perhaps in her own work, something also glimpsed in Cibic’s cinematic ruminations: “Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.” Stalin may have demanded the labor of ten thousand men to build his palace, but there is freedom in the water, in swimming under the surface. It’s Cibic’s triptych image of her divers’ splash, a sort of momentary escape, that stays in my mind, like a gift.

Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition Stagecraft (featuring The Gift 2019-2021) is on view at MAC Lyon through January 2, 2022.