10 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Lectures and discussion on the publication of the Reader on the 70th anniversary of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts
The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2025. To mark the occasion, a comprehensive reader has been published featuring a collection of texts by local and international writers. The contributors position the Biennale within a broader theoretical framework, highlight seminal events and key figures, and observe the development of the exhibition from its beginnings in 1955 to its most recent editions. Alongside essays, the Reader also comprises interviews, extensive visual material and a chapter entitled The Biennale in Infographics. The Reader is a bilingual Slovenian-English publication edited by Nevenka Šivavec and Gregor Dražil. Its contributors include Anthony Gardner, Ana Sladojević, Stefana Djokic, Jennifer Noonan, André Pitol, Annosh Urbanke, Breda Škrjanec, Božidar Zrinski, Kaja Kraner, Nevenka Šivavec and Maja Vardjan.
The Reader will be launched with a full day of lectures and discussion marking the conclusion of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, on Friday, 10 October 2025, at MGLC Švicarija.
Programme:
10.00–10.10: Introductory welcome and address, Nevenka Šivavec, MGLC Director
10.10–11.10: Lecture: Anthony Gardner
11.10–11.30: Break
11.30–12.30: Lecture: Ana Sladojević
12.30–13.30: Lecture: Nora Sternfeld
13.30–15.00: Break
15.00–16.30: Presentation of the Reader, participating: Gregor Dražil, Jennifer Noonan, Nevenka Šivavec, Annosh Urbanke.
Moderator: Ajda Ana Kocutar
LECTURES
Anthony Gardner: Zoran Kržišnik and Curating Worlds from Yugoslavia
The lecture by Anthony Gardner explores the curating worlds assembled by Zoran Kržišnik during his directorship of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from a chapter written for the book celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Biennale, Gardner will evaluate some of the curatorial strategies, possibilities, and pitfalls presented by Kržišnik’s approach in light of Yugoslavia’s ambitions for internationalism and with reference to other strategies of “worlding” undertaken by other curators at the time (most notably, Oto Bihalji-Merin). How did the Biennale present new (curatorial) worlds of internationalism after 1955? And what problems can we perceive, in retrospect, in the framing of the Biennale as an emblem of Non-Aligned politics?
Anthony Gardner is a contemporary art historian working at the intersection of political theory and art and exhibition histories. His main research areas are postcolonialism, postsocialism, and curatorial histories. He is a Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Ruskin School of Art and a Fellow of The Queen’s College at the University of Oxford. His books include Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (2015), NSK: From Kapital to Capital (2015, co-edited with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), and, with Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016).
Ana Sladojević: Thinking with/through art as a process, in times of global repositionings and the emergence of new political subjects
In this presentation, Ana Sladojević is embracing a form of decolonial thinking from the region as a tool for grasping both the longue durée and recent histories of our countries, in order to address the ongoing global political realignments and their effects on us. Within the various hierarchies established between centres of power and their (semi)peripheries, as well as within the nation-states themselves, which dictate who the ideal national subject is, the continuation of violence, along with its normalisation and erasure, persists and even intensifies during the tumultuous political climate we are currently experiencing. The Eastern European and Southeastern European countries emerge – especially instigated by the Russian invasion and the war in Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza – as sites of re-definition, re-organisation, and debate regarding their positions in relation to the long-standing European histories of colonialism and racialisation. It is therefore essential to understand how our histories and present circumstances are interconnected and simultaneously disjointed, both among themselves and within the global context, in order to grasp the emergence of new political subjects.
The Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts presents a compelling case study in terms of its institutional resilience amidst regional and global transformations over the past seventy years. It demonstrated a significant level of critical engagement and rigor in its approaches to representation, and an astonishing ability to embrace transformation itself. Considering the framework that the Biennale provides, Sladojević deliberates on the role of art as a process – one that we can engage with and through. Transcending its normalised institutional confines, though, presents a challenge akin to imagining entirely new epistemic practices and new ecologies of being together.
Ana Sladojević is an independent curator and art theorist based in Belgrade. By integrating curatorial and artistic approaches in her practice, she highlights the often overlooked privileges and epistemic violence that are sustained within the heritage sector, which is frequently regarded as normative and paramount in construing social memory and remembrance. Her recent initiatives explore the interrelations among the nation-state, citizenship, heritage, racialisation, violence, and war. She is presently a guest curator at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade.
Nora Sternfeld: Biennials as Contested Spaces
“Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,” as Anthony Gardner and Charles Green propose, “biennials became self-conscious.” Increasingly they are reflecting on themselves as “hegemony machines” (Oliver Marchart) and, for this very reason, also understand themselves as places of intervention. We have to come to terms with the fact that biennials today are both “Brands and Sites of Resistance” and “Spaces of Capital and Hope” (Panos Kompatsiaris).
As Nora Sternfeld discuses in her lecture, today, those writing the history of biennials agree that this phenomenon – beginning in Venice in 1895, with a second wave founded in the 1950s in São Paulo, Alexandria, and Kassel – cannot be understood from a purely Western perspective. The world performatively asserted by each art exhibition is contested, operating amid national and transnational orders within evolving political conditions. And we can immediately imagine that this world is portrayed differently in 1951 in São Paulo, in 1955 at the Biennale for Mediterranean Countries in Alexandria, or at documenta in Kassel – each following different worldviews, different notions of past and future, of modernity. In the 1950s and 1960s, against this historical backdrop, many biennials were founded: the Alexandria biennial in 1955; the 1st International Exhibition of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, also in 1955; the Bienal de Coltejer in Medellin, Colombia in 1968; and, also in 1968, the Triennale India in Delhi. Many other examples from before 1989 could be named, showing that biennials played an important role for different and competing transnational formations of “the world”.
Since 1989, however, there has certainly been no shortage of global biennials. And as this phenomenon shows, biennials are not only “hegemony machines” for resistance but also perform a function within and for neoliberal “globalisation”. And today? After the boom of the 1990s, there are now more than three hundred biennials worldwide, with new ones continually springing up. Their spread also gives rise to new art discourses, which in turn critique the biennial phenomenon – to which they owe their existence. In short, biennales belong to a disputed terrain: power relations are underpinned here but also called into question.
Nora Sternfeld is an art educator and curator. She is professor for art education at the HFBK Hamburg. From 2018 to 2020, she was documenta professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. From 2012 to 2018, she was Professor of Curating and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki. In addition, she is co-director of the /ecm – Master Programme for Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the core team of schnittpunkt. ausstellungstheorie und praxis, co-founder and part of trafo.K, Office for Education, Art, and Critical Knowledge Production (Vienna), since 2022 of INGLAM – Inglourious Art Mediators – a band for lecture performances (Hamburg) and, since 2011 of freethought, Platform for Research, Education and Production (London). She publishes on contemporary art, educational theory, exhibitions, historical politics, and anti-racism.
DISCUSSION
with editors and contributing authors:
Gregor Dražil (editor)
Gregor Dražil has a master’s degree in art history from the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, and is currently working on his PhD thesis at the same department. He has been employed at the International Centre of Graphic Arts since 2018. His research explores the history of Slovenian modern art (with a focus on printmaking and murals) and the Slovenian art system since 1945.
Jennifer Noonan (contributing author)
Jennifer Noonan is Professor of Art History at Caldwell University, NJ. Her research focuses on twentieth century art, particularly the history of prints and international exhibitions. Her publications have appeared in Print Quarterly and OBOE (On Biennials and Other Exhibitions). Her current book project centres on the Smithsonian Institution’s International Art Program’s Graphic Arts Workshop. Her research has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Terra Foundation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Tyson Fellowship at Crystal Bridges.
Nevenka Šivavec (editor)
Nevenka Šivavec is a curator, writer, and editor. She graduated in comparative literature and art history. Since 2011, she has been the director of the International Centre of Graphic Arts, the main organiser and producer of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, and a holder of an extensive international graphic arts collection. In 2018, she completed Leadership in Visual Arts training, a programme provided by Deusto Business School Bilbao, NYU, and the Guggenheim Museum. She is an executive board member of the IBA (International Biennial Association) and was the Artistic Director of the 32nd and the 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2017 and 2021).
Annosh Urbanke (contributing author)
Annosh Urbanke is a curator, researcher, and writer based in Amsterdam and Antwerp. With a specific interest in neo-avant-garde and postsocialism she collaborated on various projects and is a researcher at the M HKA in Antwerp.
Ajda Ana Kocutar (moderator)
Curator, editor, and producer Ajda Ana Kocutar is also co-founder and co-curator of ETC. Magazine (2021–), and together with Hana Čeferin and Lara Mejač, she leads the Ljubljana Art Weekend (2024–2026) programme within the collective of the same name. She has organised numerous exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad and regularly contributes texts to exhibition catalogues and other publications. She is the assistant curator of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts.
The event will be held in English.
On the day of the event, the Reader on the 70th Anniversary of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts is available for purchase at a special price: €32.
Upcoming events
October 2025
