A Cosmic Collective: OM production and Its Second Coming
6 February – 23 August 2026
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM
Exhibition opening: Friday, 6 February 2026, at 8 p.m.
The opening of the exhibition will feature a performance of OM production's Amanda Fior Daliso's film Tetraplan (1981–85). A quadruple 16 mm projection simultaneously looping through four projectors in combination with one Super 8 projector will be performed by Erwin van 't Hart.
In the 1970s, an extraordinary cinematic impulse formed at the intersection of countercultural mysticism, poststructuralist doubt, and emerging media technologies: to film what eludes the eye, to make the world visible through a sensory ritual that becomes a channel for communication in discovering the unseen. No longer a mere tool of representation, the camera became an aerial tuned in to cosmic frequencies.
OM production was not a traditional film collective, but a fictional entity existing as a concept and a myth, embodied in performative projections of 8 and 16 mm films. Transcending the boundaries of film, its practice combined performance, sensory assaults, and collective anonymity. It is an entity that is both a creative subject and an aesthetic construct – an association of freelance creators who existed in their anonymity primarily as ideas and as names on filmstrips. OM production operated as a fluid identity changing with the project, place and time, communicating with this blurring of identities that the meaning is not created by the author, but by the work itself. The exhibition explores the work and identity of this most mysterious phenomenon of Slovenian and Yugoslav avant-garde or experimental film, while also commemorating the 50th anniversary of its founding and celebrating its revival.
Curator: Ana Mizerit
A catalogue will be published to coincide with the exhibition. It will include essays by Ana Mizerit, Ivan Ramljak, Oskar Ban Brejc, Maja Krajnc, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Blaženka Furstnagel, and OM production, and a list of exhibitions and a bibliography by Vita Kobal.
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Established in Ljubljana in 1975, OM production made more than 40 films that were shown at numerous festivals in Yugoslavia and abroad over a period of 12 years until its dissolution in 1988, announced in a final declaration. Working outside institutional frameworks and evading pinpoint categorization, this enigmatic collective occupies a liminal place in the history of Slovenian and Yugoslav avant-garde film: between film and performance, between archive and myth, between institutional history and the underground circulation of works. Its creative production defies traditional categories and definitions, including, in addition to film production, photography, avant-garde theater, radio, (musical) composition, electrography, the written word, and multimedia installations.
