Sinzo Aanza receives the Audience Award of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts

As part of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts entitled The Oracle, curated by Chus Martínez, the audience has once again chosen its favourite. The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts has a long tradition of awarding prizes, dating back to the first edition of the Biennale in 1955, and since 2013, the Audience Award has also been included among its prizes.

Voting for the Audience Award of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts took place on the Biennale website and concluded on Monday, 6 October 2025. The artist who received the most votes was Sinzo Aanza, presenting his series The Irregular Line (2025) – drawings and prints – at this year’s edition of the Biennale, on view at the Jakopič Promenade in Tivoli Park.

Sinzo Aanza’s series The Irregular Line explores the invention of colonial art in Congo through the notion of the regularity of the line. The line acts as a temporal barrier between, on the one hand, precolonial artistic practices and, on the other, a modernism that refers to the ordering of all things and all practices according to the will and control of the colonial project.

The regularity of the line refers to the ethnological intent to classify, assign and fix everything that the new political order deemed illogical, primitive, disordered, uncontrollable or rebellious. Thus, an absolute boundary is drawn between what was, what is and what must be. The regularity of the line goes beyond the framework of ordering the space and its representations, notably through art, to be the racial charter and the hierarchisation of cultures and bodies.

The drawings also refer to the history of heads brought from the colonies to the capitals to be studied, in order to accelerate the understanding of local populations and their integration into the colonial order. The artist addresses the fragile preciousness of preserved objects, as well as the duality of beauty and meaning that draws aesthetic considerations alongside the historical weight of heritage. The heads draw our attention to the primitive history of museums established through conquests and the submission of enemies, who were then put on display through their possessions.

Congratulations to Sinzo Aanza on receiving the Audience Award of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts!