The structures we inhabit also have a peculiar way of inhabiting us. They inaugurate us as subjects, place us within society, offering specific understandings of morality, ethics, and justice. In other words, they often aid in placing us as social beings, and thus giving way for the expressions that make us most human to emerge. But what is it that happens when these structures are totalising? What does one do in response to the rigid dogmas of the powers at large? 

These questions were at the heart of Július Koller’s practice. Born in Czechoslovakia, Koller bore witness to the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union. Its restrictive policies informed what it means to gather, to produce, and to create. For Koller, this marked a need for playfulness, cosmological thinking, and an expansion of the present paradigms, all of which is captured by his seminal UFO series. In this series, he creates diagrammatic drawings paired with playful expansions of the acronym (Universal-Fantastic Question Mark; Universal Futurological Organisation; and so on), amplifying the possibilities embedded within three letters. Such humanist gestures sat at the heart of Koller’s practice, as he strove to engender, in his words, “new cultural situations … and ultimately new life, a new creativity, and a new Cosmohumanist Culture.” This very utopian response was Koller’s signature and subject-matter from the 1960s onwards. 

Borrowing its title from a work by Koller, UFO: Universal Futurological Organisation brings together 9 artists from Central and Eastern Europe and Hong Kong namely Andrei Pokrovskii, Angela Chow, Clarice Blanche Hu, Djordje Ivačković, Jocelyn Chan, Július Koller, Kateřina Ondrušková, Monika Žáková, Vlado Martek. Working across sculpture, drawing, and painting, the artists included in this exhibition pull focus (in resonance with Koller) on the small gestures that widen our imagination of the future. UFO: Universal Futurological Organisation initiates a dialogue shared by artists across geographies and temporalities, as each responds to the social and affective paradigms that surround them. 

Július Koller is represented by two works in this exhibition: one from the UFO series, which modifies the letters to mean “Universal Fantastic Question Mark,” and the other from his “Anti-Happenings” series. The playfulness of Koller echoes with the spirit of the Croatian conceptual artist Vlado Martek, whose drawings and assemblages are instances of visual poetry. The abstractions of Djordje Ivačković are sparse and corporeal, as his marks borrow from the improvisational language of jazz. Echoing this process are the luminous and layered surfaces of Angela Chow, which engage in the uncertainty of her chosen medium: watercolor, plant dye, oil paint, wax, amongst others. Her use of light and pigment, resonates with the lush canvases of Kateřina Ondrušková that draw upon memories of the natural world and the taxonomy of built environments. The materially rich wall-sculptures by Clarice Blanche Hu abstract corporeality, paying close attention to the ways in which it records memories and the passage of time. The handblown glass sculptures of Jocelyn Chan stay with the trouble of language and memory, as she finds glassworking, wherein imperceptible marks shape the contours of a transparent surface, to be an apt metaphor. The lightness of Chan’s marks form a dialogue with the subtle trompe l’oeils of Monika Žáková, an artist known for representing the beauty of the folds and the creases of her chosen subject-matter—usually cloth, paper, or metal. Meanwhile the world that Andrei Pokrovskii creates is brimming with totemic figures and an anachronism amplified by a static and dioramic backdrop, verging on the theatrical.