Project 7 - An Exercise
With a Whistle
in the Streets of Ljubljana

SALT Beyoğlu, Floor 2

Milenko Matanović, OHO Group
Project 7 - An Exercise With a Whistle in the Streets of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, 1969)
Duration: 6’28”

The Slovenian neo avant-garde artist group OHO were active in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. The members of the group wanted to develop a radically different relationship with the world: instead of a humanistic position, which implies a world of objects dominated by the subject, they wanted to achieve a world of things, where there would be no hierarchical difference between people and things; the correct relationship towards such a world is not action, but observation. OHO used various media (and forms inbetween) including drawings, photographs, film, video, music, texts, as well as an attitude towards their attire, ways of living and behaving, to redirect the awareness of people into Reistic observation.

The OHO Group formed in an atmosphere of new artistic practices: from the aesthetic, philosophical and social movements of reism, structuralism, poststructuralism and Tel Quel across to the New Left, hippy culture and all the way to arte povera, body art, experimental film, conceptualism, processualism, post-object arts and ludism. Ludism is also the concept of Project 7 - An Exercise With a Whistle in the Streets of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, 1969). As Marko Pogačnik (co-founder of OHO) said: “Our works were often made as a provocation to get the public to play. An example of this is Milenko’s project of walking the streets with a whistle. Anyone who wanted was welcome to join in.”

Performance instructions:
1. A group of people walk with an initiator around town.
2. At the sound of the initiator’s whistle, the group freezes in a pose.
3. When they hear the whistle again, the movement continues.


Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana