The 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts Announces Its Participant List, Locations and Public Programme Concept

Sanaz Sohrabi, Specters of the Subterranean (part 1): Rhymes and Songs for the Oil Minister, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Close up scan of a full stamp sheet issued to mark the inauguration of the First Arab Petroleum Congress held in Cairo 1959. Original Archive. Courtesy of Sanaz Sohrabi.

35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts
From the void came gifts of the cosmos
September 15, 2023 – January 14, 2024
https://35.bienale.si/en

The 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, running from 15 September 2023 to 14 January 2024, announces its participant list, locations and public programme concept.

Across multiple sites, Artistic Director Ibrahim Mahama and his curatorial collaborators: Exit Frame Collective, Alicia Knock, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Inga Lāce, Beya Othmani and Patrick Nii Okanta, have invited artists and collectives from Africa, Europe and beyond, working in print, film, installation, and performance, to present new and site-specific commissions alongside existing works. Historical graphic work from the Biennale archives will also be exhibited, serving as a journal revealing traces of the important gatherings and workshops in printmaking, film and more.

Celebrating contemporary art and printmaking as a tool used to foster transcultural alliances, From the void came gifts of the cosmos explores the ecosystem of friendships, solidarities, and unearthed histories of resistance between post-independence Ghana and the former Yugoslavia. It considers how the emancipatory vision of Ghana’s first president, Pan-African theorist Kwame Nkrumah, led to the creation of an intellectual, cultural, scientific, and economic infrastructure that defined Ghana’s first republic. Nkrumah’s vision was expressed through collaborations between architects, designers, structural engineers, and urban planners practicing in countries such as his own and the former Yugoslavia, who were part of the Non-Aligned Movement. Harnessing connections between contemporary art and printmaking within fields such as architecture, design, agriculture, botany and medicine, the biennale reflects on the dissemination of broader visual culture to form spaces of potentiality, portals between localities that transcended borders.

Artistic Director Ibrahim Mahama elaborates:
“As curators, From the void came gifts of the cosmos, has led us to find ways in which we can go back in time. The exhibition will be presented in multiple forms, historical, contemporary, pedagogical – so we ask – how do we use historical and other forms to establish new dialogues. One of the most important decisions that we have made in the exhibition process so far, was to open it up to students. At the outset of our research process, we embarked on a marathon of school visits in Slovenia, which was an incredible experience. It was from that some very interesting proposals were born, and the curatorial team selected a number of students whose work will to be presented within the exhibition context, as artists”.

New and site-specific commissions alongside existing works

With a strong emphasis on built environments and their entanglement with modern histories of anti- colonial and anti-imperial struggle, nationalism, and internationalism, the biennale presents numerous new and site-specific commissions, which engage with these complex legacies.These include works such as Sonia Kacem’s site-specific Hotel Hodnik (2023). Comprising wallpaper prints and lithographs, it is installed in the passages of multiple biennale venues. Kacem reanimates these spaces of movement and transit from the past and reminds us of MGLC Švicarija’s former function – between 1908 to 1930 it was a hotel, a place of hospitality and trans-geographical junctions. In Extensions of Struggle (2023), Amina Menia ponders over spontaneous urban formations in Algeria’s capital. Through an installation and a series of lithographic prints, the site-specific work examines how urban material environments can be re-appropriated, reconfigured, and seized by human and non-human intervention. It posits informal layouts in urban spaces as archival matter and activates their historical materiality and poetic potential. Filmmaker, archivist, and researcher, Nabil Djedouani, presents new commission, There is no End. The work is a fictional investigation surrounding two Algerian figures of the underground international anti-colonial resistance. Mohamed Boudia (1932-1973) was an activist, a theatre director who died during a bomb attack in Paris, while Boubaker Adjali alias Kapiaça alias Nicolaus Husseini (1939-2007) was a photographer, reporter, and diplomat who served multiple liberation movements across the African and Asian continents. By connecting seemingly heterogeneous elements, Djedouani foregrounds the secret histories of dissent and clandestinely links them. For their new commission, artists Janek Simon and Max Cegielski travelled to Ghana to research traces of Polish sculptor Alina Slesinska, who created a monument of Kwame Nkrumah at The Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in Winneba in the 1960s. The artists’ work will serve as a reflection on the significance of past alliances and the potential for transnational solidarity in the present day.

Alluding to more traditional forms of graphic art, artist Jaanus Samma’s newly commissioned hand- woven rug references Estonian wedding gift traditions, exploring a more intimate side of international friendships and solidarity. Queering the otherwise traditional symbols he also made similar rugs for the biennale’s sister projects in Riga, and Kaunas. Artist and research collective from Ljubljana, Nonument Group, will present their newly created archive of the Pioneer Railway. A now largely erased history of an initiative that existed in Slovenia between 1948-1954, it allowed younger generations to learn about railroad technology and in turn socialist values of community and labour. By creating this new archive alongside former participants of the initiative, the collective will look beyond ideological aspects and place emphasis on community spirit and a willingness to work collectively towards a more positive future. Delving from the notorious training of a group of filmmakers in the former Eastern bloc, Hamedine Kane will explore the legacy of USSR trained Ousmane Sembene, a groundbreaking Senegalese filmmaker and educator, who elaborated forms of popular education through specific image use and translation processes. Nolan Oswald Dennis will bring to life, the unrealized film concept by his Prague-trained uncle, about the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

Existing works include La Bête, a modern tale by Yasmina Benabderrahmane (2020), a multimedia installation of two stories – one of family the other of land – that took place during multiple trips to Morocco upon the artists return after a decade. Benabderrahmane captures and collects images from spontaneous real-life situations to form video fragments that are treated like sculptures, a collage of conversation between two worlds. Drawing directly from archival material Sanaz Sohrabi’s Specters of the Subterranean (part 1): Rhymes and Songs for the Oil Minister (2021-ongoing) is a mixed-media installation. It presents a growing constellation of stories, events, and fragmented archives surrounding the untold story of the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC) and its cultural and political importance for the oil-producing countries of the Global South.

The Biennale will highlight the transhistorical importance of printmaking, drawing upon the decolonial educational forms which Mahama explores in the residues of post-Independence Ghana. South African influential printmaker and painter Pat Mautloa, who participated to the Thupelo and Triangle workshops and currently runs the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, will share a fragmented history of printmaking in South Africa, a political tool within the anti-apartheid struggle as well as a long-lasting radical platform for black education. Also on display, are prints by Mohammad Omar Khalil who participated in the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in the 1970s. Khalil is an important printmaker, teacher and one of the founding participants of the printmaking workshop in Asilah (Morocco), which was once a transnational meeting place, a school, and a radical utopia for decentralized modernisms which the artist will revive through a collaboration with Abed Al Qadiri. Based on friendship exchanges and encounters, artists will revisit the Global South exchanges embedded in the MGLC collection. For example, Virginia Chihota will personally respond to the Zimbabwean artworks gifted to non-aligned Yugoslavia, in an experimental installation based on her formative years with Bulgaria trained and Harare based printmaker Chikonzero Chazunguza, while Temitayo Ogunbiyi will share an intimate tribute to Dr Bruce Onobrakpeya, a Nigerian modernist pioneer and founder of the renowned Harmattan workshop and contributor to the New Culture magazine in the 1970’s.

Public Programme

Curated by Exit Frame Collective, the biennale’s public programme Agyina: Advisory of Sages will constitute an assembly of educational, relational and ephemeral situations such as film screenings, symposia, bodily performances (theatre, dance, etc), musical concerts, exhibition tours, workshops (practical and discursive), unannounced exhibitions in the public spaces of Ljubljana, and more. This extended programming of the Biennale – which also ties into the cosmic framework of the Parliament of Forms, augmenting the idea of the ecology of things, objects, relations, experiences and so on – speaks to the overarching dialectics of failure and potentiality, negativity and affirmation, impossibility and miracle.

Agyina is a concept borrowed from the Akan (Ghana’s largest ethnic group) notion of council. Culled from a Fante proverb which translates to ‘wit, one head does not take council or literally, one head does not go into a meeting with itself’, the phrase proposes that it takes more than one voice to have a meaningful discussion or debate. Agyina: Advisory of Sages aligns with the curatorial premise of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in exploring the Biennale as “a void and site of potential”, conjuring a cosmos of forms, solidarities, futures, resistances, and transnational relations that go beyond the inegalitarian centre-periphery dynamics of empire and domination.