The festival
The guests
Influ Labs

The Influencers 2006 - guests

The Influencers 2006
Chicks on Speed
DJ Spooky
Il Male
Irwin / NSK
Molleindustria
Oscar Brahim
Vuk Ćosić

CAT
ESP
ENG

Irwin/NSK

Part 5

The East Art Map book.

The Influencers 2006

Irwin /NSK

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?