The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom

MGLC, the International Centre of Graphic Arts, unveils the full concept for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts—The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom—which takes place from June 6 to October 12, 2025. The 36th edition will be curated by renowned curator, lecturer, and researcher Chus Martínez as Artistic Director.

The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2025. Since its beginning in 1955, the Biennale has showcased the works of around 9,000 artists from 122 countries. Throughout its history, it positioned Ljubljana and Slovenian art into a global context and helped shape the international discourse in the field of printmaking and contemporary art. In 2001, marking a significant shift from national selections to a curated exhibition format, the Biennale began commissioning new works, resulting in 245 new art pieces to date. This period also saw the involvement of 30 curators and the utilisation of 53 exhibition venues, reflecting the Biennale’s ongoing evolution as a space for experimentation, critical reflection, and inter-institutional collaboration.

The 36th edition of the Biennale unfolds in various venues: the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC), producer of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, which is located in two outstanding historic buildings in the heart of Ljubljana’s Tivoli Park (Grad Tivoli and Švicarija); outdoor venues in Tivoli Park with two site-specific projects; the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna galerija) situated at the south end of the park; and the City Art Gallery Ljubljana (Mestna galerija Ljubljana) in the city centre. All works—apart from two—have been specifically produced for the Biennale. 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.

The Oracle
The Oracle names and honours the symbolic place 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. 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, is a place we give to ourselves in order 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. In ancient Greece, the caretaker of the famous oracle at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was a singular priestess: the Pythoness. She was trained to interpret the circumstances and was said to foresee the future.

Who is at the centre of The Oracle in Ljubljana
Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball). 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 in today’s Ljubljana Puppet Theatre in 1951, which immediately became an incredible hit after its Ljubljana puppet theatre and radio premiere, and that has now lived on the puppet stage for several decades.

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 biennial 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. Žogica—a puppet born out of the concern about who controls whom—connects the old dream of autonomy with the new nightmares around technology. Ajša Pengov formulated this question in the following terms: Should puppets be operated by hands or strings? Should they be an extension of our human body or become independent? The strings that sustain Žogica were the longest at that time: 2 metres and 17 centimetres. Pengov’s aim was to give birth to a new being: the indigenous puppet. Jože Pengov, a director and first artistic director of what was then the City Puppet Theatre, began to put the principle of the indigenous puppet into practice with Speckles the Ball. “He showed that puppets can be autonomous and independent, that they do not need to be modelled on the so-called big theatre, i.e. on the human/actor, his movements and facial expressions; moreover, it is not good for puppets at all if they tend to do so.”[1]

The puppetry traditions and their interest in inventing autonomous beings made with 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 embodies all of this. All in all, 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, Artistic Director of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Head of Art Gender Institute at HGK/FHNW and Associate Curator at TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

[1] Vesna Teržan, “Zagonetna dama slovenskega lutkarstva [Enigmatic lady of Slovenian puppetry],” Mladina, November 11, 2018, 46.