The oracle does not answer, it suggests. It is neither calculation nor algorithm; its knowledge is woven from pauses, riddles, and metaphors. The Greeks knew this: consulting Delphi meant receiving an incomplete, ambiguous message, always open to interpretation. It was a space for political and personal inquiry, but above all, a reminder that the future was not predetermined.

Today, the oracle has been replaced by the algorithm. As McKenzie Wark explains, feeds, data, and predictions function as a modern oracle that promises a calculated collective destiny, erasing uncertainty and mystery. Against this illusion of inevitability, Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative philosophy proposes the notion of the “absolute contingency”, nothing guarantees that tomorrow will simply extend the present; reality may turn radically different, open to the unforeseen.

Between the Greek oracle that speaks in enigmas, the algorithm that imposes a statistical fate, and the philosophical speculation that opens up contingency, stands the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, reclaiming the power of the riddle and the freedom of interpretation. In contrast to today’s culture of transparency and prediction, this biennial revives the oracle as a fertile ground for ambiguity, a place to imagine, speculate, and wield fantasy as a form of dissent.

Curated by Chus Martínez, this edition entitled The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom unfolds as an oracular promenade across five venues —four in Tivoli Park and one in the historic city center— and it is opened until October 12. Following Martínez proposal, the journey begins at Moderna Galerija (MG+), by attending to what truly matters, Palestine, whose contemporary reality demands our full attention. Here we encounter the work of Jerusalem-born Noor Abed. In A Night We Held Between (2024), Abed transforms the traditional Palestinian dance into a solitary act of defiance. A woman dances with a stick, as a replacement of the sword and the collective struggle, symbolizing autonomy and resistance against oppression. Her choreographic drawings trace the movements of the stick, connecting body, territory, and colonized memory, mapping an aesthetic and political form of resistance. The work invites us to reflect on the space between ritual and action, where dance becomes an exercise of freedom and the land itself partakes in resistance.

Noor Abed, A study of a stick: movement notations and notes on defiance, installation detail (still from A Night We Held Between, 2024), 2025. Venue: MG+

Descending into the MG+ auditorium, we encounter Infinite Repetitions (2025) by Slovenian artist Ema Kugler. The work combines two of her previous films —Homo Erectus (2000) and Echoes of Time (2013)— into a collage that discards conventional narrative, unfolding images carefully choreographed and suspended beyond time and space. Figures from the first film emerge from the subconscious, confronting mortality in a danse macabre meditating on life’s fragility and fate. The second part portrays the suffering caused by violent conflict and displacement, exposing how the devastation of many stems from the decisions of a few and the blind devotion of their followers. The work transforms the exhibition space into a stage where past and present overlap, offering a profound reflection on history, power, and the endless repetition of human tragedy.

Ema Kugler, Infinite Repetitions, 2025. Venue: MG+. Photo: María Muñoz-Martínez

Tras MG+, caminamos por la Jakopič Promenade, que se convierte en un territorio de memoria material gracias a The Irregular Line (2025) del congolés Sinzo Aanza. Sus dibujos sobre fondos negros muestran cabezas, fragmentos humanos y vasijas, recuperando la historia de la explotación minera y colonial. Aanza analiza cómo la “regularidad de la línea” operaba como frontera colonial, clasificando y domesticando prácticas consideradas primitivas o rebeldes. Lo cultural y lo folklórico eran reinventados para ferias internacionales y un modernismo al servicio del control. La línea se convierte en carta racial y jerarquización de cuerpos y culturas, mientras las cabezas evocan la violencia fundacional de los museos, objetos bellos y frágiles extraídos de las colonias, donde estética y opresión se entrelazan.

Walking along the Jakopič Promenade, the path becomes a landscape of material memory thanks to The Irregular Line (2025) by Congolese artist Sinzo Aanza. His drawings on black backgrounds depict heads, human fragments, and vessels, recalling the history of mining and colonial exploitation. Aanza examines how the “regularity of the line” operated as a colonial frontier, classifying and domesticating practices deemed primitive or rebellious. Folklore and culture were reinvented for world fairs and a modernism in service of control. The line becomes a racial ledger, a system of hierarchy over bodies and cultures, while the disembodied heads evoke the foundational violence of museums, fragile and beautiful objects extracted from colonies, where aesthetics and oppression intertwine.

Sinzo Aanza, The Irregular Line, 2025. Jakopič Promenade

At the end of the promenade lies the MGLC Grad Tivoli, where Turkish feminist artist CANAN presents her poetic cosmos, intertwining the personal and the political. Her installation Şehretün’ar (2024) spans four rooms, exploring privacy and personal boundaries, compassion toward oneself and others, mercy as a transformative force, and finally, intrinsic value, repeated as a mantra: “I value myself.” Through tactile materials and symbols evoking history and spirituality, CANAN proposes a space to consider coexistence and democracy through care and attention, reminding us that every act of recognition toward the other is also an act of subversion against systems of domination.

CANAN, Kıymeti Zatiyye (Intrinsic Value), 2025. Venue: MGLC Grad Tivoli

The heart of the biennial beats between puppets and poetry. Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball) created by Ajša Pengov in 1951, reappears as a tutelary figure of the exhibition. Throughout the venues, the verses of Svetlana Makarovič and the puppets of Silvan Omerzu weave an invisible thread that connects the entire itinerary. Omerzu’s puppets act as sentinels, welcoming visitors while staging small dramaturgies, scenes that seem from another era but speak to our own. Suspended between theater and sculpture, the human and the autonomous, the childlike and the political, his wooden figures —fragile yet unsettling—become a multiple oracle, posing the eternal question: who controls whom? Is it the hand that guides, or the puppet that possesses the hand? At the same time, they evoke the Yugoslav military past, social shadows, and the mystery of creation.

Ajša Pengov, Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball), 1951. Venue: MG+

Leaving the park, we walk toward Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, where we encounter Hieroglyphs of the Monadic Age (2025) by German artist Ingo Niermann and Madrid-born Mayte Gómez Molina. The film, appart from being stimulating, is also intellectually didactic. Its hieroglyphs unfold into an animated catalogue of environmental, social, political, and emotional scenarios, based on Niermann’s essays The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order.

The piece explores the interdependent coexistence between an ideal of interspecies harmony and humanity’s tendency to retreat into identity bubbles, offering monadism as a paradigm of self-sufficiency that redefines social parameters. Together with programmer and artist Gómez Molina, concepts such as “ego tribe,” “automatic privacy,” and “co-op fantasy” are transformed into dynamic, multidimensional visualizations, humanized through playful figurations—drawn from transversal cultural icons—that make complex ideas accessible.

Chus Martínez strategically placed the work in the city center, visible from the street alongside shops and cafés, thereby reaching a wider audience and fostering critical thought among the public. It is my favorite piece of the biennial, its structure allows us to read the present as the outcome of social, political, and technological trends that have led us to an unsustainable situation, one almost simultaneously marked by structural segregation on a global scale. As Slovenian Žižek points out, these ideological dynamics lead us to our contemporary reality without us being fully aware of it.

Ingo Niermann and Mayte Gómez Molina, Hieroglyphs of the Monadic Age, 2025. Venue: Mestna Galerija Ljubljana

At the biennial, each work appears as a mineral, animal, bodily, diagrammatic, or temporal variation of the oracle, reminding us that every voice is mediated and that there is no message without artifice. In the face of today’s urgencies, metaphor may seem insufficient, yet therein lies its force, reclaiming fantasy as a political tool, keeping the future open. And this is not merely symbolic; fantasy activates critical thinking, collective consciousness, and ethical reflection. From the historic Žogica Marogica to contemporary visual and sonic landscapes, The Oracle shows that imagining other worlds is not an escape, but an act of resistance; one that asserts autonomy, empathy, and community, closing the circle with the genealogy of the Greek oracle.

Silvan Omerzu, The House of Our Lady, Help of Christians, 2025. Venue: MGLC Švicarija

(Cover image: Silvan Omerzu, Mr. Captain (detail), 2025. Venue: MGLC Grad Tivoli)

All images © Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive. Courtesy of the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.

36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom
On view until October 12, 2025, at Moderna Galerija (MG+), MGLC Grad Tivoli and Švicarija, City Art Gallery Ljubljana, and the green lung of the city, Tivoli Park.