The 36th Ljubljana Biennale Embraces Whimsy

In Ljubljana’s beautifully maintained Tivoli Park, the air always smells of freshly cut grass. This bucolic setting is a fitting central location for the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, where whimsy and fantasy are the predominant forms of expression. Curated by Chus Martínez, ‘The Oracle’ comprises numerous new commissions, many of which feature cutesy, non-human actors – from mosquitoes and ghosts to angels and stingrays – and takes as its starting point the admirable idea that art offers a ‘tiny and meaningful spot’ from which we can ‘dream and demand freedom’. 

The opening room of the Museum of Modern Art – centered on Ajša Pengov’s puppet Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball) – is an early standout. Žogica is a brightly coloured spherical creature with absurdly long strings, originally created for an eponymous play in 1951, staged at what is now Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. Shown alongside Table for a Poet (2025), an installation of wooden humanoid puppets and flapping bird anamotons by artist Silvan Omerzu – one of only two participants shown across all five venues – Pengov’s piece embodies the biennale’s manifesto: that art can obliquely address subjects we are often unwilling or unable to confront directly – in this case, questions of autonomy and control.

Gabriel Abrantes’s Bardo Loops (2024), presented in a multi-room video installation at MGLC Grad Tivoli, thematically builds on this idea through his computer-animated ghosts. It’s a delightfully bizarre work that sees simple spectral forms – white bed sheets with holes for eyes – engaged in intense, melodramatic scenes rich with human feeling. On the first screen, a figure sings a dramatic ballad at the piano, his invisible hands mournfully pressing the keys. On the second, a ghost tells their partner they are no longer in love before exiting their presumably shared home for good. The longer you watch, the stranger and more claustrophobic the videos become, with characters and viewers trapped in a never-ending loop of emotion.

Compared to these idiosyncratic visions, a small water-themed section at MGLC Švicarija could have been lifted from any biennale of the past five years. Here, works such as Joan Jonas’s stingray watercolour Ray (2018) and Miles Howard-Wilks gouache landscapes bursting with aquatic life – including Crocodiles with Babies on its Back (2023) – compellingly argue that animals are sentient creatures deserving of respect and protection. However, they feel somewhat out of place within the broader exhibition, particularly considering that Slovenia is almost completely landlocked. In the darkened basement, Autonomous Energy Machine (2025), a pairing between Ljubljana-born artist Vesna Petrešin and her father, environmental scientist Dr Eugen Petrešin, attempts to highlight Petrešin’s research into generating clean, free energy through a set-like installation of laboratory, complete with prototypes and equations. The effort is somewhat undermined, however, by a vague wall text that notes that the prototype is too ‘difficult to describe … in scientific terms for the artistic minds’.

While I understand the desire to write for a general audience, this elliptical approach is echoed throughout the exhibition literature, filled with euphemistic references to ‘dark forces’ and ‘times of increasing insecurity’. To me, this reflects a wider issue with biennale making today: how much should the works reflect current crises and, in a globalized world, which ones should take precedence? If we can’t explicitly name an issue – whether due to censorship or a desire for open-endedness – is there still value in gesturing towards it? As the biennale suggests, puppets can address difficult topics obliquely – a skill that may become increasingly vital as more countries slide from liberal democracy toward totalitarianism. If we want to ‘demand freedom’, however, we must first articulate what we want freedom from.

The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, ‘The Oracle’, is on view at various locations in Ljubljana until 12 October

_{Main image: Silvan Omerzu, Table for a Poet, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Museum of Modern Art (MG+); photograph: Jaka Babnik / MGLC Archive}