IBA Stage: “The Oracle” – 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts

Left: Nicole L’Huillier, Rehearsal Room, 2025. Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive. Right: Kathrin Siegrist, A Shade We Share I, 2025. Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

IBA Stage: Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts
August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)
11:00 am (Ljubljana/GMT+2)
https://36.bienale.si/en/

We are pleased to announce the next edition of its IBA Stage series, this time dedicated to the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, one of the world’s oldest and uninterrupted biennials, which continues to offer a critical platform for the arts in the region.

Curated by Chus Martínez, this year’s edition is titled The Oracle. At the heart of the biennial is a desire to reclaim and redefine the biennial as a space for resonance, vibration, and relational knowledge. Drawing from her curatorial statement, Martínez invites us to move “away from narrative and language into rhythm, movement and vibration.” In this framework, the art becomes “a way of transmitting, translating, transducing”, not just a visual form, but a tool for sensing and signaling across bodies, times, and worlds.

The Ljubljana Biennale, established in 1955 in the context of socialist Yugoslavia, has always been a key event in the cultural calendar of the region its spheres of influences, it has been a laboratory of ideas and a space of experimentation. With The Oracle, Martínez continues this tradition, offering a curatorial proposition that places intuition, emotion, and cosmological thought at the centre of artistic practice. As she writes, this becomes “a biennale of echoing, one that thinks about how resonance is felt and how signals are carried.”

Featuring installations, sonic practices, performances and material gestures across Ljubljana, The Oracle invites us to consider how we relate to the more-than-human, to the ancestral, and to possible futures. Martínez writes:

“We want to transmit signals to the more-than-human, to ancestors, to those still to come. We want to sense the joy of the future. We want to stop inhabiting pain and inhabit the cosmos instead.”

For this IBA Stage session, we are joined by Chus Martínez together with participating artists Nicole L’Huillier and Kathrin Siegrist, whose works resonate closely with the biennial’s expanded understanding of graphic arts as a field of emotional and planetary communication.

We invite you to join us on August 5 at 11AM CET as we reflect on how The Oracle unfolded—from curatorial vision to artistic process—and how it carries forward the legacy of the Ljubljana Biennale as a site for speculative practice and transformative thought.

Stay tuned for more news from us on this upcoming IBA Stage event and keep following communications on the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts.

To have the possibility to hear and discuss with the individuals behind biennials has been a key component of what we believe IBA can offer to our members and the wider public and we value your participation through our live streams. As always IBA Stage events are meant as a moment to hear about a project through its makers and have the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Register here for the event!