Mitsutoshi Hanaga & Jusatsu Kito Sodan (Group of Monks Bringing the Curse of Death), 1970

Courtesy of Mitsutoshi Hanaga Project Committee (Taro Hanaga, Gallery Kochuten and Aoyama Meguro)

An Annex. Notes from the Penumbral Age (Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Mitsutoshi Hanaga & Jusatsu Kito Sodan (Group of Monks Bringing the Curse of Death), Beom Kim, Peter Nadin & Natsuko Uchino & Aimée Toledano, ZAKOLE) | The Šempas Family | Natalia LL | Karel Miler | OHO (Marko Pogačnik, Milenko Matanovič, David Nez, Andraž Šalamun, Naško Križnar, Iztok Geister, Matjaž Hanžek) | Marika & Marko Pogačnik | Porodica bistrih potoka / The Family of Clear Streams | Miloš Šejn | Petr Štembera

Emergency Exit curators: Ana Mizerit, Bojana Piškur, Zdenka Badovinac, Igor Španjol.
An Annex. Notes from the Penumbral Age edited by Sebastian Cichocki.

The exhibition Emergency Exit revolves around the burning environmental issues of our time, looking for answers in postwar neo-avant-garde artistic practices and current ecological initiatives. Responding to apparently hopeless situations of social and ecological cataclysms, such initiatives seek ways to survive in a system affected by the collapsed structure of the ecosystem.

This first part of a more broadly conceived and larger project is staged on the first floor of the museum, commingled with a selection of works from Moderna galerija’s collections. Its main emphasis is on the heritage of the holistic environmental activities of the OHO movement and the art collectives and artistic practices that were inspired by it.

In the second half of the 1960s, the OHO movement developed several ways to overcome what was then already a quite catastrophic ecological situation on Earth, joining the international trend of kindred visionary movements of the time. OHO’s reism was based on recognizing beings and things as independent subjects – such a liberation of nature from human appropriation opens up the possibility for (self-)healing of the planet and a transformation of the human community. OHO’s land art projects involved beings of nature, acknowledging the autonomy of natural phenomena and nature’s cosmic elements.

In the post-OHO Group stage, Iztok Geister and Marko Pogačnik developed a holistic ecological approach founded on ornithology (Geister) and geomancy as the art of recognizing the multidimensionality of the landscape (Pogačnik). Today, Pogačnik is looking for a way out of the situation our civilization is facing by developing a new level of working with the elemental consciousness of Earth and all of its visible and invisible beings.

In the 1970s, the Šempas Family (which evolved from the OHO Group, when the latter self-abolished and settled in the village of Šempas, not far from the Slovenian-Italian border) aspired to create a model of human civilization founded on working in harmony with the Earth and its spiritual dimensions. An open and fluid commune, the Family brought together agriculture, crafts, and creative artwork. The Family of Clear Streams followed suit, an ecological and art commune established in a small village in Serbia, based on respect for and development of ecology, humanism, and culture. For 45 years the Family of Clear Streams has kept up its poetic resistance to the senselessness of our civilization and the crisis of ideas, a resistance that can likewise be found in the performance works of Natalia LL, Karel Miler, Miloš Šejn, and Petr Štembera.

Also presented is a selected chapter of The Penumbral Age. Art in the Time of Planetary Change, an exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw - An Annex -, based on observations and visualizations of the changes underway on planet Earth, and providing a space for discussion on “managing the irreversible” and new forms of solidarity, empathy, and togetherness in the age of the climate crisis.