BIO28: Double Agent

The 28th Biennial of Design (BIO28), which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, will take place between November 21, 2024 and April 6, 2025. It is organized by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) and the Centre for Creativity (CzK), with the curatorial concept developed by professor and curator Alexandra Midal together with Emma Pflieger, assistant curator. This year’s biennial represents an important milestone in sixty years of development in the field of design.

Political, bold, vibrant, and provocative, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? examines the figure of floriography, a code hidden within flowers to transmit secret information. The core of this transdisciplinary and multifaceted exhibition scrutinizes the pivotal role of floriography used by women to portray their identities. In that sense, flowers pave the way for antagonistic and alternative interpretations of both the meanings and the context in which they are decrypted. 

The exhibition draws on critical theory to define self-identification as an aesthetic and political act that resonates with vanquished, marginalized, forgotten, or invisible minorities. Given that flowers represent both the commodification of women into an idealized beauty paradigm and serve as a feminist, anti-colonial, gender, and queer cryptology, the title Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? reflects this dual perspective. The Biennial displays an ongoing investigation that questions the role of the exhibition in providing answers, and instead wishes to open a series of conversations with designers, artists and the public.

Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? celebrates floriography as an autonomous language, specifically examining its cryptic nature in a prolific international body of works spanning diverse media and disciplines, such as design, applied arts, visual art, books, films, installation, architecture, etc., a perspective that has been scarcely investigated until now.

An expanded exhibition format will focus on a series of interconnected contemporary and historical projects, and specific commissions and will trace a history of floriography, weaving a web of its contemporary occurrences, punctuated by a series of condensed anachronic case studies that connect them.

Furthermore, it will explore and highlight the strategic nature of artifice and ruse that lies behind the fragility and beauty of flowers. Today, flowers offer a possibility to thwart, criticize, and deconstruct multiple figures of tyranny.

Against the grain of design historiography, put forward by the disciples of the Modern Movement, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? delivers a renewed perspective on expanded design, articulating how these cunning strategies can constitute a valid perspective for reconsidering the discipline.

Join us in experiencing the captivating Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? exhibition and design commissions at MAO, Ljubljana. In collaboration with the Centre for Creativity, MAO is hosting an open call (open until March 1) inviting designers, creators, spatial planners and others to participate in BIO28. As this transdisciplinary exploration unfolds within the research of the production platforms, a vibrant array of affiliated events will dot the local area. We extend a warm invitation for you to become a part of Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?, actively participating in shaping the narrative of BIO28. More at bio.si.

Press office—BIO
Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Manca Košir, press.bio@mao.si. Press kit.