We warmly welcome you to the 20th edition of the Mediterranea Biennial.

This edition invites you to gather, reflect, connect, and engage. It is a celebration of young artistic voices, a space for dialogue, and a moment to consider the limits we share—those that define and divide us, and those we can collectively reimagine. Across borders, disciplines, and languages, Mediterranea 20 offers an invitation to explore the realities and futures of living together.
In 1985, Barcelona hosted the inaugural Biennial of Young Artists from Mediterranean Europe, marking the beginning of a significant cultural movement. This initiative aimed to provide a platform for young artists from the Mediterranean region to express their creativity and engage in cultural exchange. Over the years, the Biennial has evolved into a prominent event, fostering dialogue and collaboration among emerging artists across Europe and the Mediterranean.

The 20th edition of the Biennial, Mediterranea 20, is set to take place in Nova Gorica, Vipava and Gorizia, cities symbolically positioned on the border between Slovenia and Italy. This edition aligns with the European Capital of Culture 2025 initiative, embracing the theme "BORDERLESS." However, rather than celebrating the absence of borders, the Biennial invites reflection on the personal and collective boundaries that shape our identities and societies.

Under the curatorial theme our collective limits …, the Biennial will showcase the works of numerous young artists who explore the complexities of boundaries—geographical, social, and psychological. The event aims to create a space for diverse voices and perspectives, encouraging critical discourse and mutual understanding.

The Mediterranea Biennial is promoted by BJCEM – Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, a network founded in 1984 that brings together cultural institutions, cities, and independent organisations. Since its first edition in Barcelona in 1985, the Biennale has been a crucial platform for intercultural dialogue and artistic exchange, supporting generations of artists across more than 19 editions in cities like Sarajevo, Rome, Athens, Tirana, Skopje, and Thessaloniki.

This edition is curated by Tia Čiček and Misal Adnan Yıldız and is organised by GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, BJCEM and ŠKUC Association.

Join Us for the Opening Days

Join us for the opening days of Mediterranea 20 – Young Artists Biennale, from 30 May to 3 June 2025, in Nova Gorica, Gorizia, and Vipava. Experience exhibitions, performances, and discussions by over 100 emerging artists exploring the theme "Our Collective Limits." Highlights include the Young Artists Forum, site-specific installations, and participatory events. Engage with art that transcends borders and challenges boundaries. 

PROGRAMME

Exhibition Dates and Opening Times

Explore the work of emerging artists at these locations:

EPICenter

Tues – Sun, 10:00 – 18:00

Mostovna

Tues – Sun, 12:00 – 18:00

Palazzo Lantieri, Gorizia

Tues – Sun, 12:00 – 18:00

Lanthieri Mansion, Vipava

Mon – Fri, 10:00 – 18:00

The School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica

Mon – Fri, 10:00 – 18:00

Xcenter, Nova Gorica

Mon – Fri, 09:00 – 19:00

Kulturni dom Gorica

Mon – Fri, 9:00 – 13:00 and 15:00 – 18:00

Site-specific installations are also available at:

- Kostanjevica Tunnel

- Underpass at Nova Gorica Railway Station

Curatorial position

our collective limits … | meje v nas … | i nostri limiti collettivi ...

Dear bodies,

We welcome you to the 20th edition of the Mediterranea Biennial. To gather, to celebrate, to be, to share joy, to connect through care and conviviality – to think our collective limits ...

This edition follows the environment of the GO!2025 with a critical stance towards its theme, BORDERLESS. The theme is a clear and direct connection to the border between the two cities in two countries – Nova Gorica and Gorizia. Instead of trying to create an environment which celebrates borderlessness, the biennale aims to rethink the personal and collective boundaries through the works of 94 young artists and its title, »our collective limits …«. The levels of these limits are determined by geographical, racial, and class factors.

Every exhibition and project is an invitation – an opportunity to bring diverse voices, contexts, and complexities into a discussion. A Harawayan gathering of particular perspectives to create connections – a tent which can encompass and transmit an essence of objectivity that isn’t centred in the West, heteronormative, cis and male perspectives. What first excited us about this journey is something deeply familiar to our practice: the act of coming together across differences.

The Biennale of Young Artists' traditional open-call format also offers a chance to challenge curatorial hierarchies, hear from artists who may otherwise be excluded, and assemble new, unexpected tapestries of artistic practice.

The Biennale’s venues span a varied landscape – from heritage sites and schools to public institutions and non-profits – each alive with human activity and part of the European Cultural Capital's transformation. They include the soon-to-open EPIC, a museum focused on community and cultural history; a train station and its surroundings; Mostovna, an artist-run space known for alternative concerts and its TIR Gallery; a historic tunnel beneath the Kostanjevica Monastery; the Art Academy in Nova Gorica and its former spaces on Via Diaz; the spaces of the Slovene communities in Gorizia, Slovenski Kulturni Dom Gorica; and heritage sites in nearby Vipava; with points of departure into the urban, but also into nature.

Rather than following a single, predetermined path in a didactical sense, the biennial engages visitors through diverse forms of participation. For instance, performances will be staged for viewing but also for participation, addressing context-sensitive themes that speak directly to the local communities. As another example, each venue will host a unique table, menu, and commentary to explore the past, present, and future of food.

We live in a world that hurts.

And still – we continue.

We create exhibitions, host biennials, produce events, publish publications and nurture conversations – is that truly our way of showing up? But it’s not enough to just keep going. We must also ask: How do we stay relevant? How do we transform ourselves and our ways without becoming hardened or afraid of change?

We continue even as Europe once again finds itself under siege by the far right. We continue while nationalist, racist, and fascist ideologies grow louder, emboldened by fear and nostalgia. We continue because we remember the last century, the wars, the genocide, the cleansing – and we know it is our responsibility to ask: What have we learned? What can we learn from each other?

In this spirit, we centre our work around forms, forums, and food.

Forms enable us to position ourselves within art contexts, yet artists explore the unconventional across disciplines and media. We are interested in how breaking down the boundaries between art, architecture, performance, and installation is a necessity of today. We don’t ask what art is but rather what art can do.

Forums address the discursive. The discursive spaces that trigger an exchange of thoughts, ideas, concerns, solutions, and experiences that aren’t polished or finished. We need spaces to think aloud, disagree, sit with our emotions and share each other's burdens, even if we don’t understand them. Feminist and queer struggles, justice, the right to the city, the right to be seen – these are not topics for quiet contemplation. They demand collective reckoning. In forums – whether in the discursive ether surrounding the artworks or the BJCEM-organised forum centring artists as decision-makers – we open up space for precisely that.

And food.

Not »edible art,« but food circles.

Here, material meets meaning. Food is a medium and a metaphor. A reason for gathering, a chance to make kin, and nurture survival and resistance. Through food-based projects, we explore care, gender, economic injustice, the environment and the politics of consumption. For us, enjoying and sharing food is a feminist and queer act: it disrupts, nourishes, and connects. It starts with a bite and ends with a story. It creates space for intimacies and random encounters.

We see this biennial as a space for resistance.

With the 20th edition, we bring the legacies of past struggles into the now. A space where bodies are not hidden or aestheticized but liberated. Where beauty is inclusive, where sexual freedom and fluidity are honoured, and where we encounter a generation of artists hit with one disaster after another, experiencing an unprecedented lack of safe spaces and stable environments.

We are feminist. We are queer. And this is our grounding.

We want to create space for street actions, performances, installations, and fine-art formats; however, this ties into the understanding of art that doesn’t stay safely inside the white cube but spills into the streets, the parks, and the marketplaces. Art that invites participation. Art that insists on presence. Art that demands rights.

We believe this edition is not just a showcase of promising young European artists but also a data-driven exploration of how new generations approach the fundamental questions surrounding the sharing of spaces, territories, borders, and the limits of our bodies.

Our limits define our current ecosystems and hold the potential to become an insightful guide into the future. They invite us to examine the collective experiences of young artists and how their work pushes against the limits of political, cultural, ecological, and personal boundaries.

And perhaps reveal what younger generations crave …