30th Biennial of Graphic Arts
14.9. – 24.11.2013
Ljubljana

The jury, whose members included Tevž Logar (president), Chema de Francisco, Sally Tallant and Dusica Kirjakovic, awarded the Grand Prize of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts to Cuban artist María Elena González for her work The Tree Talk Series. 

The jury stated: “In its complexity, the work entitled The Tree Talk Series depicts the potentials that the graphic process as such has to offer in this day and age. The artist traverses through the various expressive mediums (print, performance, installation, sound), extremely precisely, harmoniously joining them into a whole that is convincingly “anchored” in its conceptual framework. The piece has an extremely poetic air to it (at times even romantic in the way that it relates and escapes into nature), because of which it leaves the door to reflection wide open to the individual. On the other hand, however, it is analytical in its approach and speaks directly of the complexity of nature, its order, and in an extremely subtle way, establishes a relation with science and its translations into the cultural sphere, and consequently into the field of art. In this way, the artist and the artwork openly speak of the fact that artworks (as they were before and as they will be after) can serve as a kind of reminder to the viewer, since each one of them is a record of a state that is, without exception, such as every individual … whether it be death, anxiety, identity, transience or love. Something that each one of us can always recognize.”

María Elena González (1957), born in Havana, Cuba
Lives and works in New York and Basel, Switzerland.

In addition to the Grand Prize, the jury also gave an Honourable Mention to Meta Grgurevič and Urša Vidic for their project GalanterieMécanique / Fil d’argent.

The project could be described as a dance performance in which man is replaced by objects, while all the elements, including objects, music and lights, are closely connected and reciprocal in their responses. All of this creates an atmosphere of a ballet. With a thoughtful playfulness and curiosity, the artists move between history and memory, whereas their mechanized environments, full of shadows, become a sort of symphony of kinetic objects, video, performance and music.

Meta Grgurevič, born 1979, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Urša Vidic, born 1978, Kranj, Slovenia
Both live and work in Ljubljana; a collaborative team since 2009

Image: Maria Elena González. Photo Courtesy Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts