Irwin / Neue Slowenische Kunst

Irwin / NSK - part 1 Introduction. Neue Slowenische Kunst and its beginning in 1984 (Laibach started in 1980, while Irwin and Scipion Nasice Theater in 1983). We started to work together in times of large civil society movements. Art and theory were trying to answer the question of what kind of state we were living in. We took art as a religion, each group within its own media. A brief survey on the various groups comprised within the label of NSK: Laibach, a music and art group which was meant to work as a mirror of the state. Scipion Nasice Theater: in those firts 4 years we went from the phase of illegality and anonimity to the phase where we were doing shows and performing for 2000 people. As a state theater we wanted to claim the end of theater, so the group eventually died. The design department: New Collectivism (born in 1984). The scandal of the Nazi poster.	Irwin / NSK - part 2 The Irwin collective. The Was Ist Kunst series on the ideology of art. We don't consider ourselves as political artists, but rather we focus on how art itself is always political in certain contexts. We work on icons and stick on just a few "motifs" (subjects). In our paintings we are not interested in endorsing the idea of the supposed artist's freedom of choice in the subject. A new scenario in the 1990s, the fall of the Berlin wall: eventually the East and the West were coming together and belonging to the same world. We found this idea very dangerous: was it a way to abolish dofferences? A constatation: art in Eastern Europe was done in different social and economical context, so it was different. Saying that art is global is just part of its ideology. The origin of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) embassy in Moscow. How does the East sees itself?
Irwin / NSK - part 3 The Black Square on Red Square guerrilla action (with the help of KGB). We said to ourselves: "If the embassy works we can create the State". So we did: we created the NSK State, a state in time, not in space. That was a stand on autonomy. As Irwin we understood it as a communication tool, even though the different groups not necessarily were adopting the same approach. We have no right to deny citizenship to anybody and the NSK has now more citizens than the Vatican. The Transnationala project: traveling along the lines of colonization from west to east across the US we tried actually to get a picture of ourselves from outside (while in Moscow the East was looking at itself).	Irwin / NSK - part 4 The Interpol exhibition, the art exhibition that divided the East and the West. The Retro-avantgarde project. All "isms" in art were coming from the west, while for us every "ism" was a product of fiction and we managed to create our own: retro-avangarde. Somehow in the East the art system was lacking some of the elements it had in the western society. So it was not a matter of opposing to something or reclaiming our own space, but to build reality. Our condition was to construct our own condition. Local histories and mythologies in the East. We understood that today radical art is not interventionist, since this is just what is expected by the market, the modernist approach of art intervening in the reality. From our point of view it was more interesting doing something perfectly legal to show some different pictures that did not exist: the East Art Map project.
Irwin / NSK - part 5 The East Art Map book.	Irwin / NSK - part 6 More from the East Art Map project. For this project we did not consider ourselves as experts, but as who provides the conditions for a project to be realized. Questions and answers (selection): what about being provocative about German occupiers names in the 80s (when it might have even been an innocent move) and then in the 90s in revisionist and war times?