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. 

--Aaditya Sathish