The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts: The Oracle

Surprising, thrilling, enchanting – under the artistic direction of Chus Martínez, the works in this biennale show a genuine heartfelt passion for the world in which we live

Nicole L’Huillier, Rehearsal Room, 2025. The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, City Art Gallery Ljubljana. Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Various venues, Ljubljana, Slovenia
6 June – 12 October 2025

by BETH WILLIAMSON

Begun in 1955, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts is this year celebrating its 70th anniversary of uninterrupted activity. This 36th edition is entitled The Oracle, referring, as the biennale literature explains, to “the ancient name for a place where we meet the future and can explore the power of fantasy to renew our faith in freedom and solidarity”. If that sounds fanciful, then the artistic direction and curation of Chus Martínez brings accompanying rigour that ensures a biennale in which a thorough and serious exposition of artistic research is at the foreground of proceedings.

It is the rigour of philosophical thinking that here brings contemporary artistic practice into play in a manner that is also informed by love – not a romantic idea of love, but a genuine heartfelt passion for the world we live in and where it might be heading. Martínez wonders if culture is the core from which some better world order might regenerate. She asks if this is the place from which we can ask the questions that are important to us. Why now as our global situation seems so urgent are we seemingly frozen, doing little to make change? Art, Martínez says, is precisely the place from which we can operate for the better. In this way, art becomes a meeting point, a source of inspiration where we can be present with ourselves and each other. Ideas of freedom, friendship and citizenship emerge here.

Silvan Omerzu, The House of Our Lady, Help of Christians, 2025. The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, MGLC Švicarija. Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

The work of 25 artists is presented across the city in different venues. Only two of those artists present existing work while 23 present new material. Each venue welcomes visitors with the work of Slovenian writer Svetlana Makarovič (b1939) and Brestanica-born Slovenian puppeteer Silvan Omerzu (b1955). This note of hospitable familiarity at each venue acts as a point of reference allowing ideas to flow between the venues: MGLC Grad Tivoli, MGLC Švicarija, MGLC Plečnik Auditorium, Jakopič Promenade, Museum of Modern Art, City Art Gallery Ljubljana and Tivoli Park. A parallel exhibition programme runs at the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, ISIS Gallery, “S” Gallery at Ljubljana Castle and, again, Jakopič Promenade.

This biennale works beautifully in its entirety, precipitating so many differing emotions, thoughts and feelings, encompassing a multitude of positions and possibilities that can coexist. For that reason, I am reluctant to pick out individual works, to set one above another in some way. However, there are works that surprised, thrilled and, quite honestly, enchanted me so, let me say something about those.

Kathrin Siegrist, A Shade We Share I, 2025. The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, MGLC Plečnik Auditorium. Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

One of the works that surprised me with its effect was Kathrin Siegrist’s A Shade We Share I and II (both 2025). I’m not sure what I expected from colourful billowing ripstop nylon installed in two outdoor locations, but the tenderness and togetherness they engendered in those present beneath each installation was a complete surprise. Made from discarded, modified emergency parachutes, Siegrist’s expansive works are installed one at the entrance of the Museum of Modern Art (MG+) and the other close to the Plečnik Auditorium in Tivoli Park. When I visited the latter installation, it was lent a further layer of meaning as the Catalan singer Maria Arnal activated the piece with improvised solo and community singing. The sense of togetherness was palpable.

Nicole L’Huillier, Rehearsal Room, 2025. The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, City Art Gallery Ljubljana. Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Over at City Art Gallery, the Chilean artist Nicole L’Huillier’s work, Rehearsal Room (2025), is a sonic space that again surprises with a feeling of community and togetherness. Hybrid instruments listen and respond to the sounds around them. A mesmerised audience is lulled in a space of collective trust and consciousness. In “an emergent field of listening and elastic becoming”, a state of true relaxation, meditation and dreaming is attained.

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, Open World, 2025. The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Museum of Modern Art (MG+). Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

It was a thrill and an experience of sheer unadulterated joy to watch the dual-channel video Open World (2025) by the Ukrainian film-makers Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei at the Museum of Modern Art. The story is that a boy who left Ukraine after the Russian invasion returns through the medium of a robotic dog. While the work deals with complex issues of displacement and community of Ukrainians separated by war, there is joy to be found in the encounter between a young girl and the robot dog scampering playfully in the landscape.

A work that completely enchanted me was Joan Jonas’s To Touch Sound (2024), on show at MGLC Švicarija. Jonas’s tender video of the birth of a whale is shown alongside her drawing Ray (2018). When the female sperm whale gives birth, the baby whale must be supported and protected by family members. The depth of knowledge, intelligence and love that is seen in this film opens up the realm of what is possible in the human world too.

None of the above is a reflection of current world difficulties in any straightforward way, but rather an exploration of imagined alternative futures and an articulation of hope, or at least the possibility of hope. In this biennale and the work it shares with the world, there is nothing as audacious as an attempt to present some sort of solution to the problems we face today. Instead, it delves into the possibilities, the imagined futures and the “what ifs?”. This is what Martínez has previously called the “maybe”. This maybe is “a doubt capable of taking the form of a dramaturgy inside the context where art occurs” in Documentas or Manifestas, or perhaps a biennale. If the ground is shifting beneath us, then it is the knowledge created by artistic research that has significance beyond understating. “This knowledge, difficult to express, difficult to present as a new science of the creative, able to enter both political life and commercial circuits, is a function that provides clues towards a mystery, that is: how to live in a groundless world.” Clues are all we can hope for. The rest is up to us.