36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts: Oracle
“Imagine a society that can eliminate all suffering… a society that can predict everything… in which we all love each other… Imagine a society in which humans give up power over other beings.” This lyrical fragment, operating in the register of a curatorial manifesto, greets visitors at each of the four venues of the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.

The Lennon-esque imperative imagine signals the project’s underlying ambition—unlike its heavyweight counterparts such as the Venice Biennale or documenta in Kassel—not to diagnose the present, but to speculate on possible futures. Futures imagined at a moment of profound structural upheaval, shaped by socio-economic and climatic emergencies, as well as ongoing and impending military conflicts across the globe. The Biennial’s title, Oracle—a term once denoting a divine message delivered through a priest—was proposed by curator Chus Martínez, who led the Kunstverein Frankfurt from 2006 to 2008 and has said, pointedly, that “the exhibition exudes a desire to see the current state of the world entering into another phase.”
In both her compact, ten-sentence manifesto and the curatorial diary charting the project’s development, Martínez poses foundational questions on mutual understanding, justice, and equality at all strata of human relations, along with the voices of those who found themselves excluded from dominant narratives. Her approach is imbued with compassion and empathy to the thoughts and desires of others. This ethos extends beyond her statements into the Biennial’s spatial logic: works are granted room to breathe, carefully installed across four distinct venues and into public space, each able to speak on its own terms yet also enter into dialogue with others. The result is a surprising unity—sustained not just by curatorial concept, but by the precise orchestration of its parts.
The Biennial’s Careful Pulse

The degree of care and sensitivity Martínez brings to the project was underscored repeatedly in private conversations with Slovenian colleagues during my visit.
Yet the Biennial’s central thrust is not simply to articulate a contemporary “therapeutic” sensibility, nor to indulge in futurist speculation—though such works are present. Consider Autonomous Energy Machine (2025) by the Slovenian interdisciplinary artist Vesna Petrešin, created with her father, Prof. Dr. Eugen Petrešin. Geometrically perfect acrylic-glass mechanisms generate pure energy through hydrodynamics, recalling the fragile kinetic organisms of Rebecca Horn. They operate as metaphors for a future in which human and non-human, natural and artificial coexist beyond extractive logics.
Martínez’s commitment to Petrešin, who passed away shortly before the Biennial’s opening, is so profound that the entire event is dedicated to her memory. Installed in the basement of the most remote venue, MGLC Švicarija, Autonomous Energy Machine serves as an epigraph to the exhibition as a whole, its thematic filaments extending into works across Ljubljana.
“Like many other artists in the Biennial, she [Vesna Petrešin] was a singer, a soprano,” Martínez notes1. “And as such, she saw synchronization as something we continuously seek as humans in order to transmit without words.”

Synchronization in Flux
This desire for synchronization—of beings, systems, and environments—finds resonance in Guardians (2025) by Colombian artist Nohemí Pérez, which depicts endemic tree species whose existence depends on complex symbioses with bacteria, fungi, and the animals that shelter in their crowns. Such interdependencies suggest alternative ecologies of intelligence and communication.
An attempt at reconnection with altered realities also informs Open the Door (2025) by Ukrainian duo Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. Here, a wandering drone traverses the streets of Ukrainian cities, engaging locals—not with ordnance, the lethal language of Russian invasion, but with the voice of the film’s protagonist, a displaced resident returning symbolically in robotic form to re-establish contact with familiar ground.
One of the Biennial’s most arresting works comes from American artist Gabriel Abrantes. In Bardo Loops (2025), a series of computer-animated shorts, two ghost-shaped figures are locked in recursive cycles of emotional and existential conflict. Unable to resolve them, they drift in a spiralling loop; the only way out is separation without reconciliation.
“Singing means vibration, air. And air flows like water, transmitting to an invisible world,” Martínez reflects on Petrešin’s practice, “but also allowing us to capture the million signals the cosmos is sending to us.”
Water, flow, and music also inflect the work of Estonian artist Aili Vint, represented with graphic works spanning several decades. Her geometry—somewhere between Op Art and Concrete Art—recalls the rippling surface of water, which she relates to the music of Arvo Pärt. Light, too, is central: “When your eyes dive into the clear light, you clean your eyes from the everyday,” she says. Most of her gouaches here depict refracted light, prism-split into clarity. This appeal to renewed, unclouded vision forms another of the Biennial’s thematic pillars. If the world is changing irreversibly, perhaps we must look again to apprehend its ongoing metamorphoses.
Elsewhere, Slovenian artist Mladen Stropnik invests banal, everyday forms with quiet human resonance—a mirror with a square cut from its surface becomes a portrait of a home. Congolese printmaker Sinzo Aanza, whose drawings appear on billboards along Tivoli Park’s main avenue, examines the linear structures of local contemporary art, discerning in them the lingering imprints of colonial influence.
Imagining Otherwise
Here, perhaps, the Biennial becomes vulnerable to critique: there are relatively few points of direct contact with the sharp edges of present reality. Visitors accustomed to exhibitions pitched as an urgent digest of the news cycle may be surprised by the optimism—even serenity—of much of the work in Ljubljana. When such connections do emerge, they often take a dreamlike form, dissolving into the cloud of imaginative vision that defines Martínez’s curatorial stance.
This could, from one angle, be read as a limitation. From another, it is precisely the point. The artists gathered here are not offering escapism but a shift in register. Just as tension—physical and emotional—yields to release, the Biennial does not shut its eyes to existing crises, but turns toward a “new normal” not yet realised, one the world must eventually reach. And if not now, then—at the very least—to imagine.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Valerij Ledenev (19. August 2025). 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts: Oracle. the ARTicle. Abgerufen am 11. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/14hjk


