Ljubljana Bien­ni­al

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This summer I had to chance to go to both Docu­menta in Kassel and the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al of Graph­ic Arts. Here’s my photos from one of the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al exhib­i­tions that allowed photos. The theme of this Bien­ni­al was this poem by Slov­e­ni­an writer Jure Deleta (and inspir­a­tion from Karel Destovnik). There was no over­all curat­or of the fest­iv­al this time, previ­ous winners of prizes were allowed to each choose an artist to take part. Ljubljana is a small, easy-going city, and so was the art fest­iv­al, although the artwork and exhib­i­tion present­a­tion were high qual­ity. None of the stress of Docu­menta. I have writ­ten a zine about my trips to Slov­e­nia and Croa­tia this summer, avail­able here, and am in the process of writ­ing one about my time in Germany.

There’s an article here about some of the other exhib­i­tions in the fest­iv­al (although the journ­al­ist wrongly seems to think Slov­e­nia was a Warsaw Pact coun­try, and also that there were no Slov­e­ni­an artists in the fest­iv­al)

As you come in there were these sculp­tures by Dragica Čadež

In the next room was this install­a­tion of geomancy illus­tra­tions by Marika and Marko Pogačnik titled Message from the Bosni­an Pyram­ids (there are actu­ally pyramids/​pyramidical hills in Bosnia, but the consensus is that they’re natur­ally formed)

Here’s some clos­eups of the illus­tra­tions. The major­ity of them have captions in Slov­ene and English. As far as I can tell they say the same thing. The English texts on these read: “Intu­ition concern­ing the birth of the earthly universe” and “Geograph­ic­al hand of Greece and its spir­itu­al move­ment”

This one reads “Contri­bu­tion of the Panno­ni­an Plain to the belly of Europe”. The Panno­ni­an Plain is the flat area of Cent­ral Europe which is home to Vienna, Budapest (in fact the major­ity of Hungary), Brat­is­lava, and parts of Romania and Serbia, and has some of the richest farm­land on earth.

These ones read: “Medit­a­tion on the origin of the creat­ive word” “The water of the Adri­at­ic Sea collab­or­at­ing with the miner­als of Dalma­tian Islands”, “Rela­tion­ship between Bosnia, Slov­e­ni­an territ­ory and the Alps” and “Primæv­al atom of exist­ence kept in the belly of the Balkans”.

These read: “Pyram­id of the dragon, pyram­id of the sun, pyram­id of the moon” and “Sídhe fairy beings from Ravne Labyrinth

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