Here's how Biennial of Graphic Arts curated a disruption

If contemporary art calls for a constant questioning of the norm, must not the art industry too do the same? This is seldom the case considering that most art exhibitions follow the standard 'white cube' gallery format; art fairs, biennales and such like, too, follow the calf's path with curators who organise the art into themes and exhibitions. So the 32nd edition of the Biennial of Graphic Arts, which started in Ljubljana (Slovenia) last month, is treading uncharted territory when it decided to do so without a curator.

"I think it was important for the organisers, the International Centre of Graphic Arts, to question the format of the biennial, which is at the same time questioning the system in which art takes place today," says Vladimir Vidmar, one of the nine members of this year's biennial collective.

The collective of the International Centre of Graphic Arts, or MGLC as it is called, picked Slovene poet Jure Detela's poem, Birth as a Criterion — which Vidmar describes as "a very dense work, difficult to illustrate" — and asked the Grand Prize winners of the Biennial's last five editions to recommend the name of an artist each for the current edition. These recommended artists were in turn asked to propose names of five artists, and so on, until there were 30 participating artists. The selection process became, in Vidmar's words, a combination of elements that the Biennal Collective could not control, and "very revealing in terms of what motivates the decisions in the art paradigm we all operate under".

"We were very interested in how the artist would respond to a situation where their only point of orientation was not a theme, but rather another artwork — a poem," says Vidmar. "Birth as a Criterion acted as trigger. We wanted to engage artists more directly with something that might not at first sight be close to their practice."

The organic, nomination-based model yielded artists from 13 countries with an eclectic practice. While the artists' nominations seemed to "reflect certain defaults" such as geographic connections or other kinds of proximities, Vidmar points out that the most interesting selections were when "an artist nominated a spiritual soul mate so to say".

The organisers were not making a conscious attempt to innovate or disrupt when they chose to go down this path, says Vidmar. "What we needed to reflect on was the extent to which the established protocols of (curatorial) work reproduce the system, but this is not to say that opting for a self-generating structure did the trick."

Thus, while the lack of a curator made no difference to the artists, Vidmar is candid that it was difficult for the biennial collective "to accept the fact that the exhibition itself was coming together mostly beyond our control".

"It took great self-discipline not to give in to our curatorial reflex," he says. "It would have felt much more comfortable to affirm our ideas by curating a show instead of being faced with the uncontrollable results of an experiment we still need to make sense of and formulate a position toward. This task is ahead of us."

The 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts

The 32nd edition of the Biennial of Graphic Arts started on June 16 and will run till October 29 2017 in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana. The first edition was held in 1955 in undivided Yugoslavia and was one of the few art events that managed to reach artists on both sides of the Cold War.

Thirty artists from 13 countries are participating in this year's main exhibition Birth as a Criterion at the Švicarija Creative Centre.

Vladimir Vidmar recommends art collective Slavs and Tatars' material rendering of the socio-political aspects of linguistics and phonetics, visual artist and performer Carlos Monroy's masked dance performance, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri's repurposed shelves installation, South Korean artist Moon Kyungwon's video work and Croatia-born performer, graphic artist and writer Nora Turato's opening performance — "a very concise and amazingly self-disciplined reflection on the possibilities and limits of language".