Chronologies
Daniel Grúň

U.F.O. Gallery – Ganek Gallery

Keywords: absurdity artist as curator conceptual art institutional critique site-specificity

The fictional gallery project U.F.O. Gallery—Gallery Ganek was initiated by Július Koller in 1971. It functioned as a visual and physical symbol of the connection between the Earth and the cosmos, and acted as medium to communicate with unknown civilizations. The gallery’s high location at Malý Ganek—an almost three-hundred-meter mountain peak with a  northwest wall that attracted climbers—symbolized the encounter between the earthly and the cosmic. Participants collectively drafted the statute for the project and discussed potential exhibitions. In 1980, Koller declared Gallery Ganek to be part of Universal-Cultural Futurological Operation (U.F.O.). An organizational and advisory committee came into being on September 18, 1981, and on March 24, 1982, the commission approved the program and statutory principles. Subsequently a text was produced—the constitution for the gallery which was named ”U.F.O. Gallery—Ganek Gallery, High Tatras (U.F.O.G.),” and signed by Koller, Igor Gazdík (commissioner), and commission members Milan Adamčiak, Pavol Breier, Peter Meluzin, and Rudolf Sikora. In the introduction of the U.F.O. Gallery statute, exhibition activities in the physical Ganek Gallery were ruled out; rather, it was a symbolic location used to communicate a variety of alternative forms of expressions (i.e., images, concepts, signals, etc.) with unknown civilizations on Earth and with the universe beyond. The rules of the gallery statute have a discursive quality. It was based on the assumption that the statute of a socialist institution reflects what the institution is about.

Date: 1980–83

Participants and organizers: Július Koller (b. 1939), Igor Gazdík (b. 1943), Peter Meluzin, Pavol Breier (b. 1953), Milan Adamčiak (b. 1946), Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), Dezider Tóth (b. 1947), Juraj Meliš (b. 1942)

Location: In the residential apartments of Július Koller, Milan Adamčiak, and Igor Gazdík, Bratislava-Dúbravka, Czechoslovakia