As part of the NSK Wunderkammer at Marcus Campbell Art Books, comes a talk by Alexei Monroe on Laibach, introducing their work and early beginnings:

“Twenty years to the day after the London date of the Kapital tour, Alexei Monroe will discuss Laibach’s most complex album and this memorable London performance.”

Alexei Monroe is the author of MIT publication: Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. The book will be on sale at the shop, alongside other NSK and Laibach records, posters and ephemera from the NSK display.

Monday, 14 May 2012 at Marcus Campbell Art Bookshop by Tate Modern, at 1900.

This event is free but space is limited. To reserve a place RSVP to info@marcuscampbell.co.uk

NSK State News for April, 2012, with retrospective coverage of the first London events planned for this Spring.

IRWIN – TIME FOR A NEW STATE
NSK State – NSK FOLK ART
04 April – 24 June 2012

IRWIN: State in Time, London, 2012
in collaboration with Calvert 22 and Tate Modern
Billboard location: Elephant & Castle

Calvert 22 is delighted to welcome the most influential art movement to emerge from the Balkan region in the latter half of the 20th Century – Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).

TIME FOR A NEW STATE is part of a London wide presentation in cooperation with Tate, who will be hosting a Symposium (14 April), and which will also comprise of a music performance at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (14 April), an exhibition of archival material at Chelsea Space (Chelsea College of Art) and a seminar at UCL.

Neue Slowenische Kunst was established in what was then Yugoslavia. Concerned with the political unrest in the region at the time and issues of national identity NSK projects broke through the limitations of the visual arts. Highly collaborative and based around a constant flow of ideas, NSK provided a platform that brought together theatre, music, painting, literature, philosophy, design and performance, reaching into society at large.

TIME FOR A NEW STATE will be the first major exhibition of IRWIN, the visual arts component of NSK, founded in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 1983. This ambitious display will feature seminal projects from the past twenty years including a special adaptation of Transnacionala (1996), an interactive installation enabling participants to become NSK citizens and have their own passports created. Also on display will be Kapital (1991), a site-specific installation that mixes taxidermy with religious icons, appropriating and recycling the symbols of past totalitarian governments and utopian art movements.

Public artworks across London will include an installation located at one at of London’s busiest interchanges. This specially commissioned billboard by IRWIN features an appropriated advertising slogan originally used, by a leading drinks brand, in Lagos alerting us that it may be ‘Time for a New State.’

In addition, the exhibition will examine in depth the group’s strong connections with Moscow art scene of the 80s and 90s by hosting a special event to mark the twentieth anniversary of the seminal NSK Moscow Embassy (1992), one of the most influential of all apt-art projects, central not only to IRWIN’s own practice but also to the development of avant-garde practices across the entire ‘former East’.

The downstairs exhibition space of Calvert 22 will present a selection of NSK Folk Art; a diverse collection of intriguing artefacts created by the citizens of the NSK State in Time. This virtual state, formed in 1992, today contains over fourteen thousand citizens from Dublin and Taipei to Sarajevo and New York. As it has evolved over the last 20 years, members have developed a strong sense of collective identity, which has manifested itself in the creation of a unique Folk Art, expressing citizens’ devotion to the state and ideologies of NSK. Works on display include NSK passports, stamps, plates and films made by NSK state members.

IRWIN’s constantly evolving practice continues to be at the forefront of the contemporary art scene of the former ‘Eastern Bloc’ countries. Their work encourages the viewer to critically examine the art history of ‘Western Modernism’ as they counter this with their own ‘Eastern Modernism’, pointing to the continued exclusion of contemporary Eastern European Art. IRWIN has actively and concretely intervened in social and historical activities in an era that redefined the status of art in Eastern Europe.

NSK State News for March 2012 with updates on upcoming events in Iceland and England, as well as retrospective coverage of the NSK Passport Office held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last month.

Laibach’s soundtrack for the forthcoming film Iron Sky will be available on Mute shortly.

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Laibach / IRWIN / New Collectivism / Scipion Nasice  Sisters Theatre

March 20th – April 21st, 2012
Private View: Tuesday 20th March 6 – 8.30pm

CHELSEA space proudly presents Neue Slowenische Kunst 1984-1992, a timely show dedicated to the radical Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), focussing on the archives of Laibach, IRWIN, New Collectivism and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, in Ljubljana and the David Gothard archive in London. The exhibition traces the impact of their work and the important role London played in the collective’s activities.

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