The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, William Wordsworth
THE ORACLE: A Curatorial Diary from LJ by Chus Martínez. Mousse. Series from December 6, 2024 through June 6, 2025.
The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 6. 6. ? 12. 10. 2025
Hanlu Zhang’s review in ArtForum.
The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts develops through two symbolically complementary images. At the forefront is a simple, striking title that evokes magic, imagination, and fantasy: “The Oracle.” Alongside it stands the figure of the puppet, which pays homage to Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball), a beloved Slovenian puppet character from the 1950s. This image animates conversations around power, control, and autonomy. The interplay between the two symbols articulates a view of the politics of art that, while not entirely new, feels renewed in today’s context. Yet it’s not without its risks.
The Biennale reiterates an ancient belief that artists wield a divine power to bring new worlds into being. Goddesses, ghosts, robots, human/animal hybrids, and of course puppets populate the exhibition. The puppets especially enchant. However, by the fourth or fifth encounter—especially when they appear in different works sharing the same space—the spell begins to wear thin. Also potent throughout the show is the power of words, the practice of the oracular voice. Beyond an abundance of curatorial texts, banners bearing verses by Slovenian poet Svetlana Makarovi? punctuate each venue, adding texture to the exhibition’s linguistic terrain.
In another dream, I was a field
and you combed through me
searching for something
you only thought you had lost.
~
What have we left at the altar of sorrow?
What blessed thing will we leave tomorrow?
Omens, Cecilia Llompart
An initial, fine-grained impulse is to claim an anagoge,
The pure image not enough in its ochres and rouge
[…]
We retreat from witness of its charnal blooms,
Our own premonitions of decay,
There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank. (TM)
Pleasure augers survival. (RK)
When through the village lurking
Nought gives them check or fright,
No watch dog dares to bellow,
The Wolves, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem
Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings, Juan Felipe Herrera
Anger is the sea.
Gasping and buffetted, no matter how
you struggle or plead for mercy, you drown. But pride
can clothe those shattered bones with perfect skin,
and breathe into the lover’s mouth her song.
Passions, Ruth Fainlight
Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on clouds
rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it,
[…]
I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.
To His Mother, Whose Name Was Maria, Attilio Bertolucci
Translated By Cyrus Cassells