For Artissima 2025, Avantgarde Gallery (Zagreb, Croatia) presents an overview of OHO, the Slovenian neo-avant-garde collective active between the early 1960s and 1971, with a special focus on the experimental film production of the OHO Group.
The OHO Group emerged in the 1960s in the unique cultural position of Yugoslavia (situated as Non-aligned, between the East and the West). OHO developed as one of the most significant conceptual formations in the region, and its artistic production evolved through several distinct phases.
The early phase was marked by conceptual art and Reism, a philosophical orientation that emphasised the autonomy of objects and their existence independent of human interpretation. In this period, OHO developed works in visual and concrete poetry, language-based art, ready-mades, interventions on everyday objects and object-based installations.
The second phase, beginning around 1968, expanded into actions in nature, land art, ephemeral interventions, performance, and artist publications. This period established OHO’s conceptual position, closely aligned with international tendencies such as Fluxus, Arte Povera, and early Conceptual Art, yet grounded in their own intellectual and geographic context.
A final phase, referred to as “transcendental conceptualism,” involved an increasing focus on the relationship between humans and their environment. Collective gestures, ecological awareness, and an emphasis on the dissolution of boundaries between art and life defined this period.
Throughout these phases, OHO maintained an interdisciplinary and collaborative structure, involving a wide circle of artists, poets, and thinkers. Their activities were connected to a broader intellectual scene in Slovenia.
Experimental film played a central role in articulating OHO’s conceptual language. Between 1963 and 1970, primarily Naško Križnar and Marjan Ciglič produced a body of 8 mm or 16 mm films that both documented and extended the group’s collective actions and artworks. Their film practice combined conceptual precision with minimal resources, aligning with international developments in expanded cinema and conceptual performance, while maintaining a distinct artistic and political position rooted in their context. OHO’s use of film as both document and autonomous medium represents a defining contribution to the history of experimental moving image in Central and Eastern Europe.
OHO’s international visibility was established early on. Their inclusion in the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970 positioned them within global avant-garde networks. Subsequent presentations, including their participation in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2017, reaffirmed their status as a key reference point for postwar conceptual and ecological art.
The presentation brings together a selection of experimental films, artist publications, photographs, and group’s wider activities. By placing film at the centre while situating it within OHO’s broader artistic production, the presentation underscores the collective and interdisciplinary nature of their work.
After the dissolution of the group in 1971 (itself a deliberate conceptual gesture), members of OHO continued to develop the group’s core ideas in diverse and compatible ways. Marko Pogačnik established a commune-like community, the Šempas Family, in the Slovenian village Šempas. After 1980, they dissolved, but they did represent art from Yugoslavia at the 1978 Venice Biennale, dedicated to the relationship between art and nature.
Each member of OHO pursued paths that extended the OHO philosophy of reconnecting artistic practice, ecological awareness, and everyday life, contributing to cultural and social contexts beyond the framework of institutional art.
OHO’s importance lies in the coherence of its overall artistic and conceptual vision. Their modest means, formal clarity, collective structure, and sustained engagement with ecological and philosophical questions anticipated many of the key tendencies of contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.
OHO’s significance continues to grow internationally. Their most extensive retrospective to date is scheduled to open in autumn 2026 at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, Hungary. The presentation at Artissima 2025 positions their experimental film practice within the full scope of their interdisciplinary production, reaffirming OHO as one of the most vital and forward-looking artistic phenomena of the late 20th century.
