Artists: Honza Zamojski, Michael E. Smith, Nina Koželj, Matej Stupica, Silvo Šarić, Meredith Monk, Pamela Rosenkranz, Neja Zorzut, Jon Derganc, Zdenka Pandžić, Nikola Ukić, Viktor Bernik, Nika Špan, Vadim Fiškin, Saša Spacal, Johannes Esper, Maks Bricelj, Michael Sailstorfer, Staš Kleindienst, Adam Vačkar, Gašper Kunšič, Mladen Stropnik

Curator: Vladimir Vidmar

The end that is the focus of the exhibition is the end we are already living. Post-Hegelian art and philosophy have been proclaiming their decline and demise over the past 200 years, only to reinvent themselves as anti-art and anti-philosophy; what we are facing now, however, is a wholly different matter. This end seems far more tangible, real, and inevitable. It is not a conclusion that could make way for a new beginning, but a lasting end. It is not (just) an eschatological ending, either – that is, a single apocalyptic event of colossal and (immediately) fatal proportions. As these last decades have clearly shown, our end is far more complex, long-lasting, and harrowing. The exhibition asks how to contend with the end that we are already living and will be dealing with for the foreseeable future, without veering into the utopian or dystopian, since neither hope nor despair provide a solid base or have much to contribute. Faced with the lack of a future, speculative scenarios of the future lose their foundation. What we need, then, is not just a new understanding of the end, but a completely different range of emotions for grappling with it. The End aims to address the end with a sober pessimism (Frank Ruda) to help us confront our new reality and explore its potentially new psychological range.

The exhibition does not stage a sublime spectacle of the end – reality has unfortunately proven considerably more inventive than art over the past months. Rather than illustrate or chronicle the end, the exhibition aims to reflect on and react to it. The artworks are ambivalent and can be read on several levels. One is the immediate sense of the end as the collapse of (our) civilization, a social, ecological, and cultural breakdown. Another level is the way that art thinks of its own end, and that its endless negation of itself and sense of being stuck are related not only to its failure, but the astonishing productivity of this failure. The exhibition is built around the correspondences between the collapse of civilization we are facing today and the tradition of art’s reflections on its own end. Like the end in art, the decline of civilization does not represent a complete disappearance, at least not an instant one. There is a certain remainder, a complex structure of the end: there persists an almost complete nothing, yet not a complete nothing. As Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič put it: the end will not put an end to the problems of the end. In the end, only the end itself, which cannot be got rid of so easily, endures. In the end it is the end which lasts.