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curator: Dorotea Fotivec

A retrospective exhibition of films of the most relevant Slovene Neo-Avant-Garde group OHO presents an introduction to a large retrospective of the group which will, with the Marinko Sudac Collection and the Institute for the Research of the Avant-Garde, be organised in Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, and in MAMCO-u (Musée d'art moderne et contemporain) in Geneva in 2018.

The exhibited films are a part of the Marinko Sudac Collection, and the selection made for the exhibition presents films by Naško Križnar, Iztok Geister Plamen, Marjan Ciglič, David Nez, and Marko Pogačnik, created between 1963 and 1971.
Notions connected to the OHO group films most commonly include youth culture, ludic art, hippy movement, underground, psychedelic, sexual revolution, hooliganism, they are a reaction and a commentary on the social developments in the world.
Author of most of the OHO group films is Naško Križar.
There are almost 50 films in total, and this retrospective will present a selection of 24 of them.

Križnar's earliest film dates from 1963 - Suprastructure, and most of the films were made after he moved to Ljubljana, where he had more opportunity to collaborate with the OHO group members and other collaborators, while the latest film is Highway from 1971.
Films were shot in a simple manner, due to technical possibilities without much montage or intervention into the narrative, captured in most cased by Naško Križnar's camera on 8 mm or 16 mm film.

Camera could not record sound, but part of the films have added music.
The music was taken "from the archive", folk or classical music was used, but most sound films include popular rock music from the period.
In most cases it was by the Rolling Stones, such as in Lego (1967), while the film Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown (1966) is titled as one of their songs.
As well, a song by Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction, is suggestively put as the title of one of the 1966 films, which shows Marko Pogačnik during his solo-protest against the Vietnam war, in which he alternates between writing anti-war and reistic slogans and drawings on a wall of one public space in Ljubljana in 1966.
Language is used as raw material which is put into context with the visual, intertwined with the actions in urban spaces, with the exploration of the very media of film [A Film About Film (1969 - 70); Nomama (1967)].

Additionaly, Križnar filmed some of the group's perforamances, such as the probably most know one - Triglav (1968), in which Milenko Matanovič, David Nez and Drago Delabernardina personified one of the peaks of the Alps, one of the symbols of Slovene statehood, by forming a living structure with three heads peeking out. 
Free spirit and psychodelic motives are most seen in two films by Marjan Ciglič - OU (1967) and Fuly Quanso (1967).
In Waiting for Godot (1967), Iztok Geister Plamen refers to Beckett's play. David Nez also created one film, and Marko Pogačnik, in his two experimental films - Daybreak (1968) and Eye (1967) scratched the film tape and carved letters, drawings, and abstract forms into it.
From the Projects series, there is Project 6 (1969), in which members and friends of the group are doing a sort of a happening in a public space by the transport of a large tire.
Even tough the happening is in a public space, they seem to be going through empty streets.
Project 3 (1969) shows a simple action of washing a car, accompanied by Tchaikovsky's composition.

Between 1969 and 1970, Križnar documented many projects of the OHO group.
A large number of these projects was in nature - the woods, the Zarica valley, the river bank, but as well in urban spaces. He documented, among others, Marko Pogačnik's projects in nature, as well as actions by Milenko Matanović or David Nez. These recordings were put together into two version of the so-called Summer Projects (1970), on of which will be presented in the central pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennial, the "Viva Arte Viva" exhibition, on the head curator Christine Macel's personal selection.