José Roca, who describes graphic art as the ‘unconscious of contemporary art’, will curate the 37th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in 2027.
Established in 1955, the Slovenian exhibition is one of the oldest biennials in the world.
The Colombian has previously acted as the artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in 2022 and chief curator of the Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre in 2011; he was cocurator of the first San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial in Puerto Rico in 2004 and of the Bienal de São Paulo in 2006.
In 2025 he was curatorial advisor of the inaugural Bogotá International Biennial of Art and the City, the city in which he founded and managed, alongside Adriana Hurtado, the FLORA ars+natura off-space for ten years.
Of his appointment Roca said, ‘Over the past twenty years, my work has increasingly focused on the agency of non-artistic and non-human bodies, including landscapes and bodies of water. At the centre of this proposal lies a simple but far-reaching question: what kinds of traces do we leave in the world and how are those traces registered, transmitted or transformed over time?’
‘The exhibition will approach print not only as a technical medium, but as a broader condition of contact, transfer and inscription. It will therefore include not only works of art, but also material culture, inventions, design objects, scientific artefacts and everyday forms that expand the ontology of the imprint. I envision the project as a collaborative process developed together with a team of local co-curators, whose knowledge and perspectives will be essential in shaping and refining its initial intuitions. Alongside existing works, the Biennale will feature new commissions produced through the MGLC residency programme and print workshop, foregrounding experimentation, process and dialogue between artists, materials and place.’
