The Švicarija: Community, Art and Nature project, by which the Švicarija Creative Centre will make a step into the cultural life of the capital, stems from these three basic elements that have marked the history of the building. The project consists of an exhibition and supplementary programme inspired by the building that actualise the history of Švicarija and provide the guidelines for the future. Švicarija was never merely what it was expected to be. Correlating stories that branched out from its original function in unplanned ways soon began to attach to its officially prescribed narrative. One-day escapes from the city’s hustle and bustle quickly transformed into unexpected adventures. A stroll along the promenade did not only mean a trip into nature but an important social and cultural event, which brightened up the day of the people from all sorts of social classes. This is where culture and refinement intertwined with forbidden pleasures. Tivoli Hotel was initially tied to the artificially transformed natural environment of the park and the ambitions of materialising the national identity. Within this context, a bohemian meeting place and a space of discourse about the role of art in society formed. The ambience of the coffee shop of the hotel building offered a platform for public debate and with it, an opportunity for the democratisation of society. The gradual decline of the building and quick succession of changes in management rocked the high ambitions of the hotel. Yet, even after its decline, the activities in the building did not cease. In the wake of the situation, the slowly collapsing building covered in overgrowth became a shelter for the most diverse groups of people, who breathed a new life into Švicarija. Despite the many aggravating circumstances and diversity of the individual fates of its residents, the specificity of the hotel building made it possible for a community to form as an outcome of an unexpected sequence of users. This gave the building meaning and safeguarded its existence to this very day. We can reflect on the turns and interruptions of the discontinued history of Švicarija as we stroll through the exhibition Švicarija: Community, Art and Nature, which fills its renovated premises today and was created in the cooperation of the International Centre of Graphic Arts with the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia (ZVKDS), the Museum and Galleries of the City of Ljubljana (MGML) and the ARREA Architecture Bureau.

The multifaceted exhibition consists of four sections: History, the Stojan Batič Memorial Studio, Architecture and Art. The exhibition takes us through the history and social life of the building. It presents the activities of the artists in it and highlights its recent renovation. These sections are connected by the artworks arranged along the common spaces of the former hotel, which open up to reflection on the existence of nature as a social construct. This element defined the activities of Švicarija from the onset: from the idealised peasant environment for bourgeois enjoyment, through the moment of occasional isolation and shelter of the residential community, and to its role in artistic creation as it hosted the art studios of the most prominent Slovenian artists.

With the invitation from the director of the International Centre of Graphic Arts, Nevenka Šivavec, to join forces and try to confront the renewed reduction of the biennial’s significance to dichotomous debates about outmoded binary positions such as old/new, graphic/non-graphic, media/contemporary, the members of the biennial’s collective have been given a far-reaching task to consider. In its experimental form, the new format of the biennial is expected to question the established protocols of exhibition conception and realisation, curating, the central concept and theme, and the ensuing choreographies of contemporary exhibition practice. However, this was by no means a principled decision against the system, a withdrawal from it and pretension to an external position, but rather a shift in emphasis and an attempt to open another horizon in the field known as contemporary art. The biennial has thus acquired the form of a spontaneous self-evolving mechanism, which is not driven by a central figure and concept but rather by its own history and the unruly, dense poem by Jure Detela, which dictates reaction and resists being illustrative.Poetry in general was a decisive reference point when conceptualising the biennial, although neither in the central exhibition nor in the exhibition at Škuc Gallery will the visitor encounter immediate evidence of this. Nevertheless, the exhibition This is Not a Name works as a unique and compact articulation of the principle of the biennial experiment encircling poetry. This is Not a Name is by no means a didactic device or a key unlocking the reading of the central exhibition; in many ways, it is just the opposite; the viewer is additionally confused by the unexpected eclectic selection of works that prevent easy reading in the idiom of contemporary art. Namely, the idea for the exhibition was to reconstruct the trajectory leading to the special format of the biennial, and to do so precisely through works and propositions that served, at some point, and for various reasons, as starting points and points of reference. To reconstruct our path (in an inconsistent and discontinued manner) and thus convey to the audience not a logical line of development, but rather a displaced experience that explains, via a sideway, the intention of the experimental concept of the biennial: why such a biennial and what prompted it.

While conceiving the exhibition This is Not a Name, in an attempt to come up with the ultimate reflection, the members of the biennial collective in fact went back to the beginning, namely, to the question that haunted us all the time and that we never fully unpacked: why poetry and in what form? Why is it poetry that seems interesting at the outset, regardless of the fact that it does not provide our thematic starting point or interpretive moment? Instead of the horizon of reading poetry as poetry, poetry as a special attitude to language came to the forefront; a transcendental view of language in the sense of the condition of its possibilities. Poetry as a question of how language is possible. This decision determined our thinking about the format of the biennial. Applied to the situation of being trapped in the paradigm of contemporary art and its protocols, via a consideration of new approaches to designing exhibitions, this initial commitment found its ultimate motivation in searching for answers to the question of how art is possible today. How can it be thought outside the protocols of contemporary art and spoken about beyond the weary slang of art? Our thoughts were aimed at some transcendental (NOT transcendent) view referring to the conditions of possibility of art. The selection of works comprising the exhibition This is Not a Name can thus serve not to revive our thoughts and considerations, the doubts and concerns of the biennial collective, but rather to open another entry into the main biennial exhibition by interrupting some established paths and opening up new horizons, which is also the spiritus movens of this year’s edition of the biennial in general. The exhibition This is Not a Name functions as an obstacle to the generic experience of art and it does not provide an explanation for the intention of the biennial, but rather reiterates it by insisting on works that cannot be fully captured by any context.

A simple mechanism was used: the recipients of the Grand Prize of the past five Biennial editions – Jeon Joonho (2007), Justseeds (2009), Regina José Galindo (2011), María Elena González (2013) and Ištvan Išt Huzjan (2015) – were invited to propose one artist to participate in this year's event. These artists were then invited to nominate the next five participating artists. The process consisted of five more rounds and at the end, the 32nd Biennial was supplied by the names of about thirty participating artists. By doing so, the thirty-second Biennial edition sets a transgressive moment for its biennial starting point, aiming to radically transform – not only the content of the event, but also its structure. This is already suggested by its title Birth as Criterion, which alludes to the poem of modernist twentieth century poet Jure Detela – a poem that provided the surge for self-reflection, which the Biennial has subjected itself to. Or in other words, even when the 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts rejects the framework of a thematic exhibition, it stems from a poem. Yet, this is such that it resists to provide a leading theme to the exhibition, but calls for a break with its radical questioning of all polarity. The break introduced by Jure Detela's poem resonates in the rhizomatic structure of this year's Biennial, which – without the central figure of the curator – instead functions as an entity that produces its own self. By leaving its comfort zone, whether in terms of biennial tradition or established protocols of conceiving contemporary art exhibitions, Birth as Criterion foregrounds a diversity of relationships – a multiplicity that does not possess a single common concept, but instead exists as a continuous flow of meaning, offering a multitude of potential connections and interactions among the artworks.

In addition to the main exhibition Birth as Criterion (MGLC, Švicarija and ŠKUC Gallery), the thirty-second Biennial also presents the traditional exhibition of the winner of the Grand Prize of the previous Biennial, this time Ištvan Išt Huzjan, a presentation of work by Peter Gidal, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the 31st Biennial, a project by the winner of the Audience Award of the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Meta Grgurevič, a Maria Bonomi retrospective at the Jakopič Gallery, as well as a vibrant discursive programme with an international symposium. As far as other projects are concerned, there is also the international billboard project a good neighbour in cooperation with the Istanbul Biennial, the book presenting the work of Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik, as well as the print portfolio of the artists included in the 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts on display at the Kresija Gallery.

At the time when astrologers were considered the new philosophers, the discussion about the impact of planetary movement on human behaviour foregrounded, again, the debates about historical astrology as a means of interpreting our existence and its most important events under the forces ruling the universe. Under the influence of this idea, the artist connects with the humanist spirit in order to show the implicit acceptance of causality and the determinist perception of reality as something inevitable for mankind, and to highlight the potential of art to counter the inherent fatalism of our existential doubts.

While the exhibition has a pre-defined format, typical of student shows, which are marked by variation and often lack a common starting point, it offers an opportunity to re-read and contextualise art works in an exhibition venue and to find common areas in the latest output of Academy students from different years and courses.

The title Rear Window is not only a reference to the Hitchcock film, but also to the experience of observing and watching, being observed and watched, and how we scan, see, define, look at, gaze, focus on, contemplate and admire, all of which are actions typical of artistic and curatorial practice. It also concerns the image of the window as an artistic element defining the unclear or obscure limit between interior and exterior.

The pieces presented at the exhibition analyse different aspects of what is usually defined as the interior in order to invoke a necessary doubt about what constitutes the exterior. The interior is intimate and recognisable, and is reflected in the works as a paradigm whose boundaries can be continuously defined when shaping our identity.

The apparent formal similarities between the works of Anja Jelovšek and Sebastjan Zupančič, exhibited in the same room, both based on repetitions of the same stroke, instantly invoke a moment of insecurity in the spectator, so any questions regarding quantity disappear to give way to reflection on the artists’ constant introspection. While the existential work of Anja Jelovšek seeks to reach the unreachable (or “to measure the immeasurable”, as Miha Turk writes in his text supporting the June exhibition) and is always open to the possibility of continuation, where only the limitations of space can provide a limit, the work of Sebastjan Zupančič is very much analytical. The artist creates his own system in which a photographic image is transformed into a large-format drawing in order to de-construct the latter in a new drawing of the same format executed in a different system in which only the rules and the number of strokes are the same.

The continuous process of re-positioning in our social environment in the works of Tom Stanič and Maja Burja conveys not only what surrounds us, but what is inside. In this respect, it could be said that while identities emerge from the outside, as they are the way in which others recognise or know us, they also come from within, as our self-perception is based on our internalised perception of how others perceive us. In his Still Life, Tomo Stanič presents the footage he captured at dusk in front of rear windows, which points to the paradox of our interest in the intimacy of others, which is probably no different from our own, and hints at the need to create a social identity, including a virtual one, as a vital tool of survival. Maja Burja documents the setting up of her working space from the perspective of others, defined by the coincidental position of the empty chairs of her colleagues, as if it were a choreography of non-living elements.

Past experience plays a major role in preserving and changing one’s identity, and would be lost without memory. A feeling that memory is not a consistent point of reference led Dalea Kovačec to create a new, personal imagery by merging memories on canvas. Through emotions such as happiness, fear and pain she brings to life memories linked to different moments of her childhood, outlines them and tests the veracity of her feelings by finding photographs that show these moments in her family album.

The installation using natural elements by Milan Ketiš invites us to stop the endless process of “personal re-positioning” by creating a cosmogonic space in which creation and destruction co-exist and enable the evaluation of the human need to create physical and meta-physical order.

Through repetitive acts and the arrangement of images the works remind us of the sensation of constant movement felt when accepting the exterior as part of the interior. Despite preserving former parameters, the repetitive process of transfer inevitably leads us to assume the immanence of the unfamiliar within the intimate and compels us to accept this as an essential part of our identity.

The project Eleven Thousand Rods / Les onze mille verges that artist Zora Stančič is presenting in KAPSULA, shares with Guillaume Apollinaire's fantastic novel not only the title but also its wordplay as well as its boldness, humour and, above all, its intention. Books, catalogues and art publications of all sorts, which usually gaze at us from the shelves of the exhibition space, are now wrapped in an ordinary brown paper, which we associate with the common, the trivial and the mundane. However, regardless of its initial discrete appearance, the multifaceted confluence of dualities that characterizes the work of this restless and unique artist, is echoed in this project yet again. We can consider the artist’s intervention from two perspectives – the parapornographic and the paraliteral. Their common denominator is the art form of pornographic literature as a starting point for reflection on the passionate relationship between man and art.

Reproductions of pages of coincidentally found edition of Apollinaire’s work, drawn on wrapping paper, mark the first, parapornographic perspective of the project. Like its surreal and hilarious original, the reproductions include, besides all the motives of the pornographic literature itself, the main characteristics of pornographic consumerism: obscenity as virtue, the ever-present random exchange between people and things, emotional apathy and absolutism. This intervention of books in the exhibition space transmits the perception of pornographic literature and its consumption as a symptom of severe crisis, as a dehumanized and mechanic activity with a sole goal - to arouse sexual excitement of the reader - into the artistic field. As an ironic gesture the artist uses this metaphor to mock the uncontrollable nature of current cultural scene and, same as the original, restores the value of imagination in art as an expression of individual’s freedom.  

In another aspect, the artist presents intimate, subtle drawings in a distinctively paraliteral act. Her sharp strokes demark blurred fields of human projections, desires and fears and legitimate their existence. This is how she clearly demonstrates her firm determination to contribute to the expressive and poetic role of the artistic language of the original work and its intention. As Susan Sontag claims: “experience itself is not pornographic, only images and perceptions – imaginative structures – are such” ^[4].  Through fragmentation of bodies and the absence of expressed emotions, the pornographic imagination questions the paradigms and established hegemonistic tendencies of our society and opens a space for viewers to search for their own answers. The artist’s incomplete sensual images oblige us to self-reference and construct our own images in which we create our own space, using the imagination as a powerful weapon for personal and social transcendence.

Through reading and final construction of images, the intervention invites visitors to resort to their own imagination in search of their ideals. With the project Eleven thousand rods / Les onze mille verges, which incites our curiosity and instinct in an endless search of freedom through art, Zora Stančič contributes to the work that Apollinaire entrusted to great poets and artist, which is that of fulfilling “a clear social role that is no other than continuous renovation of the appearance that nature wears in the eyes of men” ^[5].

»Sprašujem se, zakaj sem si lagal, da nikoli nisem bil tukaj in da nisem poznal tega kraja – v resnici je tukaj tako kot kjerkoli drugje, samo občutek je močnejši in nerazumevanje globlje«.[1]

Dojemanje četrte razsežnosti, kot ga tematizira razstava Vse in nič, ni ne transcedentalno ne analogno-prostorsko ali časovno, temveč ga določajo trenutne družbene, politične in kulturne dimenzije in uporaba avantgardne tradicije kot metajezika. Ta se premika od vsega k niču, ki je enak vsemu[2], s tem da prečisti umetnikovo dejavnost do jasno izrečene angažirane izjave, ki jo vendarle določajo omejujoči parametri našega delovanja. Čeprav je resnična sprememba malo verjetna, smo ji bliže že zaradi dejstva, da o njej razglabljamo.

Ko je Ilja Kabakov ustvaril Moža, ki je poletel v vesolje iz svojega stanovanja (1988), ni meril na utopičnost. Individualna reapropriacija je kozmični sen osvobodila zaprtosti v sistem in ga vrnila v izvorno bistvo. Bistvo, katerega pristnost – neumestljiva, brezoblična in neinstitucionalna – je lahko samo resnično kolektivna.[3]

Razstava na podlagi teh parametrov v vsej vitalnosti predstavi kolektivno željo po spremembi ali možnosti, da bi bila ta mogoča, in sicer neodvisno od prenosa podob in izvornega konteksta, ki presega posnemanje in apropriacijo.

Delo Žane Kadirove predstavlja nepogrešljiv dialog med preteklostjo in sedanjostjo. S keramičnimi ploščicami, s katerimi zapolni razpoke med različnimi časovnimi plastmi in vsakdanjemu vrne življenje, ujame in umesti bleščečo, vendar zamegljeno podobo sedanjosti. Prostorska intervencija podobno kot mandorla odpre novo simbolno razsežnost različnih možnosti aktualnega.

Če lahko, kot je trdil Timur Novikov, vidno zaznavo delimo na prostorsko in znakovno, se v delu Vladimirja Logutova prekrivajo različne resničnosti, znaki prepovedi pa razkrijejo resnične koordinate naše perspektive. Iskanje novih pomenov, ki bi lahko presegli običajne in dosegli nadracionalno pojasnitev, se izrazi tudi v performativni akciji Timofeja Radje Figura št. 1: Stabilnost, kjer narava – podobno kot v delu Izleti na podeželje skupine Collective Actions – služi kot nepopisan list. Jasna, neideološka narava prek osvobajajoče estetske izkušnje Radjevega dela – ne brez humorja in ironije – vključi obiskovalca, se poigra z njegovo radovednostjo in ga privabi k sodelovanju v metaforični konstrukciji brez misticističnih floskul o izgubi zaupanja v oblast.

Inkandescenčna luč žarkov v Zasebnih soncih Nikite Kadana iz zasebnega preseva avro svobode, ki je v javnem prostoru vsak dan manjša. Obiskovalec ostane zunaj utopičnih horizontov, ki jih ustvarja sijoča podoba neonskih sonc postsocialističnih rešetk, v katerih so drugi (umetniki?) želeli najti novo razsežnost. Rešetka je tukaj kot formalno in ideološko sredstvo učinkovita samo, če se ne bere kot eskapistična struktura.  A nasprotno kot v uvodno omenjenem delu Kabakova se dela na razstavi ne osredotočajo na hrepenenje po pobegu, temveč na odkrivanje novih možnosti tukaj in zdaj in posledično delovanje.

Zdi se, da čas – četrta razsežnost v fiziki – visi v kinetični instalaciji Sanele Jahić in je gibanje – sopomenka za spremembo – tisto, kar omogoča osvoboditev posameznika od prevladujočega mehanizma, ki se razkriva v absolutni premoči.

Različne strategije, katerih skupni imenovalec je uporaba polnosti in praznine kot protislovnega temelja, z uvedbo različnih materialov, nepričakovanih elementov ali manipulacije zaznavnega polja ali gibanja, prispevajo k ustvarjanju meditativne praznine, ki pripomore k artikuliranju naše sedanje pozicije znotraj aktualnih parametrov.

Pozicija, ki ji ne manjka romanticizma in je polna negotovosti in dvomov, čeprav je tudi pogumna, je predstavljena v delu Marka Požlepa One Dog, a Man and an Island. Posameznikova eksistencialna pot kot metafora za iskanje nove intelektualne, filozofske in duhovne razsežnosti se tukaj razkrije kot nepogrešljiva izkušnja za premagovanje vsega, kar nas obkroža, in niča, ki ga občutimo pri ponovnem tehtanju naše resničnosti.

[1] A. Monastirski, N. Aleksejev, I. Javorski, V. in L. Vešnevski, G. Kizevalter, slogan Collective Actions, 9. april 1978, Moskva, Beloruska železnica blizu mesta Zvenigorod.

[2] Glej: Andreeva, Ekaterina, Vse ali nič: simbolne podobe v povojni umetnosti dvajsetega stoletja (Everything and Nothing: Symbolic Figures in Post-War Twentieth-Century Art), Sankt Peterburg, Ivan Limbakh, 2004, pregledana izdaja 2011, v ruščini.

[3] Glej: Groys, Boris, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment  Afterall books, 2006.

The works of Miroslav Cukovica build a narrative by creating in-between spaces in emptiness, within which there is constant transition. The artist sees transition as transformation that bears within itself the idea of the final destination and the future. His works reject the anti-utopian methods of analyses, in which merely objective indices apply. Cukovic takes a different path, creating his own maps of potentiality beyond the closed horizon of the existing social order. This interstitial geography is made up of different mediums: collage, print, ready-made, artist's book. The artist uses them to explore the cartography of in-between space as his own art practice, developing concepts of space, identity, as well as the re-contextualisation of the individual.

Miroslav Cukovic composes utopian conceptual maps that represent the landscape of his conscious intimate transition and mappings of the current social context. This triggers the need to consider the present as a common space, which conceals the potential of the development and transformation of the individual and the social status.

Miroslav Cukovic (1982) is an American artist of Yugoslav descent. In 2005 he completed his studies at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit (Michigan, USA), where he was also a printmaking lecturer for a time. He also worked as an assistant in the Graphic Arts Department at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He regularly exhibits his prints, drawings, sculptures as well as installations around Europe and in the US, where he has been the recipient of several awards. In 2009, he carried out the intervention Orange Movement in Maribor, and last year, the project The Maribor Milky Way, which was part of the Maribor European Capital of Culture programme.

Mihael Giba is a Croatian intermedia artist, who is presenting the first solo exhibition of his work in Slovenia. His art focuses on the area of data visualization, and he has developed special computer software that serves as the basis for his installations. The common element in Giba’s projects is their mapping of both individual and global social phenomena.

The exhibition TRUST ME I TRUST YOU presents an installation of this same name, which is composed of a series of five artist books, in which legal documents and international agreements signed by the Croatian government have been translated by Giba in his own visual language in an ironic attempt to become an usefull transmitter between viewers and the language of bureaucracy. Besides the books, the exhibition is rounded out by a projection that categorizes data from a session of parliament into such groupings as sports, culture, economics, etc., and presents them as images of a digital landscape.

The artist’s chosen mode of mapping derives from his desire to create a dialogue between the state and its citizens that is as direct as possible. Through the visualization of data, he moves from the concrete to the abstract only to return again to the concrete. Such movement Lev Manovich has described as the real challenge of data art, which, he says, “is not about how to map some abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful” but rather “how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society.”[1]

[1] Lev Manovich, “Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime” (2002), available at www.manovich.net

Mihael Giba (b. 1985, Varaždin) received his degree in painting from the Academy of Art at the University of Split, where he is currently employed as a senior assistant in electronic painting and digital photography. He is a member of the international art network Zebra, which founded the exhibition space Greta in Zagreb. He regularly exhibits his work in Croatia in both solo and group shows. In 2010, in collaboration with Dalibor Martinis, he presented his touring project Global Picture in Slovenia.