The choice of an artwork, the decision to invite a selected artist for collaboration, along with the elaboration of one’s own decisions are the most (un)demanding tasks, depending on the aspects on which one founds one’s decisions.

The collaboration with Marko Košnik and the acceptance of his proposal for the exhibition LabSUs Personally are first and foremost the consequence of a long process of correspondence and the creation of textual dialogue, a part of which has been publicised in the magazine Art Words. At the same time, one of the important factors was my personal interest in the medium of writing, in the word and those artworks that included it as a constitutive element of their existence. Last but not least, the decisive element was the traumatic feeling that I have experienced when reading the documentary material on The First Exercise for the End of the World, a feeling influenced by my own role and acting in the world of art. I read it through the optics of my own work; it was mirroring the issues of understanding the nature of curating, the position and status of selectors, censors, power structures and treatments of institutional critique. It made me question the modes of handling application calls for different forms of artistic manifestations, the procedures of judging the artistic value of the works that have ‘applied’ as well as the performance and attitude of juries and the shaping of criteria for assessing one’s professional status. This work was questioning the nature of artwork and authorship. This was the root of my decision for the realisation of The Exercise for the End of the World – the aversion towards the self-assumed.

The secretiveness that was the condition for the realisation of The First Exercise for the End of the World when it was sent out at the application call for the exhibition Urbanaria (1994, SCCA-Ljubljana), and is a part of The Exercise that is in progress as I write this text and is now presented at the exhibition LabSUs Personally, transforms the interpretation and the analysis of complexity of this artwork. The condition imposed by the application call may be observed from at least two perspectives – from the right one, claiming that concealing is necessary for achieving the artistic quality, and the left one stating that this is a conspiracy designed to achieve subversiveness within the chosen frame in order to reflect upon the beginning and the ending. Still, there is at least a third interpretation, one that reveals the moment of intensification of attention and interest for those invited by the artist to participate.

The Exercise for the End of the World is an artistic entity expanding in time and space that places in its core the question of the end. The end as the time dimension or time as the spatial dimension? The end as a limit of one’s perception, as the arbitrariness of speech, the difficulty of understanding and communication? The end that strives to observe from the point of that moment backwards and onwards. The personal in the artist’s work being manifest through the empathy for the world responds to the complexity of cultural, social, economic, political and civilisational reality. Those are the levels from which the artist asks the question to the truth, which is being assembled as a puzzle and thus manifested through the artwork.