Opening: 21. november 2024 at 7 PM, Museum of Architecture and Design

Curator: Alexandra Midal

Assistant curator: Emma Pflieger

The 28th Biennial of Design (BIO28), which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, will take place between November 21, 2024 and April 6, 2025. It is organized by the Museum of Architecture and Design and the Centre for Creativity, with the curatorial concept developed by professor and curator Alexandra Midal together with Emma Pflieger, assistant curator. This year’s biennial represents an important milestone in sixty years of development in the field of design.

This year’s biennial represents an important milestone in sixty years of development in the field of design.Political, bold, vibrant, and provocative, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? examines the figure of floriography, a code hidden within flowers to transmit secret information. The core of this transdisciplinary and multifaceted exhibition scrutinizes the pivotal role of floriography used by women to portray their identities. In that sense, flowers pave the way for antagonistic and alternative interpretations of both the meanings and the context in which they are decrypted.

The exhibition draws on critical theory to define self-identification as an aesthetic and political act that resonates with vanquished, marginalized, forgotten, or invisible minorities. Given that flowers represent both the commodification of women into an idealized beauty paradigm and serve as a feminist, anti-colonial, gender, and queer cryptology, the title Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? reflects this dual perspective. The Biennial displays an ongoing investigation that questions the role of the exhibition in providing answers, and instead wishes to open a series of conversations with designers, artists and the public.

Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? celebrates floriography as an autonomous language, specifically examining its cryptic nature in a prolific international body of works spanning diverse media and disciplines, such as design, applied arts, visual art, books, films, installation, architecture, etc., a perspective that has been scarcely investigated until now.

An expanded exhibition format will focus on a series of interconnected contemporary and historical projects, and specific commissions and will trace a history of floriography, weaving a web of its contemporary occurrences, punctuated by a series of condensed anachronic case studies that connect them.

Furthermore, it will explore and highlight the strategic nature of artifice and ruse that lies behind the fragility and beauty of flowers. Today, flowers offer a possibility to thwart, criticize, and deconstruct multiple figures of tyranny.

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[ENG] BIO28 _ Double Agent_ Do You Speak Flower_

www.28.bio.si

ACCOMPANYING EVENTS

THIS HAPPY DAY OF CULTURE

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

17.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Maša Ogrin – Head of BIO)

Sunday, 8 December 2024

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Hana Čeferin – Head of BIO 28)

11.00 Creative workshop Felt flowers

Sunday, 22 December 2024

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop Interweaving threads

Sunday, 5 January 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop Designing flowers in wax

Sunday, 19 January 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Hana Čeferin – Head of BIO 28)

11.00 Creative workshop What do flowers and chairs have in common?

Sunday, 2 February 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop A different vase

PREŠEREN DAY, THE SLOVENE CULTURAL HOLIDAY

Saturday, 8 February 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Manca Košir – BIO 28 Communications Officer)

15.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Pia Groleger – Head of the BIO 28 Production Platform)

17.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Manca Košir – BIO 28 Communications Officer)

Sunday, 16 February 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Petra Sladek – Biologist and Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop Windmill

Sunday, 2 March 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Hana Čeferin – Head of BIO 28)

11.00 Creative workshop Flower masks

Sunday, 16 March 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Hana Čeferin – Head of BIO 28)

11.00 Creative workshop My poster

Sunday, 30 March 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop Ikebana

Sunday, 6 April 2025

11.00 Guided tour of the BIO28 exhibition Double agent: Do You Speak Flower? (Guided by Nuša Zupanc Pavlič – Editor of BIO)

11.00 Creative workshop Stereotype press