36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts: The Oracle
The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, MGLC Plečnik Auditorium, Kathrin Siegrist, A Shade We Share I, 2025. Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.
The Oracle names and honours the symbolic place from where all beings wonder about the course of life. Because we care about tomorrow, we should assume we care about staying alive, about a world in peaceful coexistence. Times of increasing insecurity and the experience of living in a world that refuses to accept our needs give birth to many forms of escapism and misleading decision-making. Searching for big answers and the expectation of big movements capable of undoing the damage of wars and dark forces seems unrealistic. Art—all arts—assumes the existence of a tiny but meaningful spot from where to be free and dream and demand freedom and peace. This exhibition is about this tiny spot. This Biennale claims that every art and cultural manifestation is an oracle, a place we are given to reflect and ponder on how common good is possible, how a good life based on shared values is to be achieved.
This Biennale is, then, an oracular place, a place for interpretation, and at the centre of The Oracle in Ljubljana is Žogica Marogica, Speckles the Ball. Žogica is a figure that embodies tradition, politics, and the need to invent systems able to transmit, educate, and connect people. Almost every citizen in Slovenia knows this puppet. A colourful head-ball created by artist Ajša Pengov for a play, written by Jan Malík (1904–1980), that was staged at today’s Ljubljana Puppet Theatre in 1951 and that immediately became an incredible hit after its Ljubljana puppet and radio premiere, and that has now lived on the puppet stage for several decades. The puppetry traditions and their interest in inventing autonomous beings made by craft and fantasy have an enormous potential to reflect on many of the issues that affect the modelling of our world scenarios today: gaming technology; disembodied and autonomous intelligences capable of surpassing the human; analogue mass education in times of the digital; new forms of folklore to bond and dream together. Žogica, a puppet born out of the concern about who controls whom, connects the old dream of autonomy with the new nightmares around technology. When creating puppets, writer Ajša Pengov wondered: Should puppets be operated by hands or strings? Should they be an extension of our human body or become independent? Not modelled on the theatre of human actors, but autonomous in their movements and expressions. Ultimately, the eternal question of control and controlling instead of enabling, fostering, and enhancing peaceful and fertile ways of living is what concerns this Oracle.
Peace is only possible if we love the world we live in, which is a very difficult task today. This exhibition is about learning to do so.
Chus Martínez explains, Times of increasing insecurity and the experience of living in a world that refuses to accept our needs give birth to many forms of escapism and misleading decision-making. Searching for big answers and the expectation of big movements capable of undoing the damage of wars and dark forces seems unrealistic. A biennale constitutes an environmental practice; that is, it forces us to look into a particular place and cultural context again and again. There, I found Žogica, a figure that embodies tradition, politics, and the need to invent systems able to transmit, educate, and connect people.
The Biennale curator, Chus Martínez, has also been producing a weekly column for Mousse magazine about the process of curating the Biennale. As well as an exhibition guide, a publication with texts by Manca G. Renko (historian), Sadie Plant (philosopher), Renata Salecl (philosopher and sociologist), Svetlana Slapšak (anthropologist, classical philologist, writer, and historian), and Maja Petrović-Šteger (social anthropologist) will be published by Sternberg Press. The exhibition’s graphic design is by Grupa Ee.
