Description

A catalogue with numerous articles and images on the a month long live installation with a program of lectures and public discussions, organized by the Irwin group, as a part of Apt-Art International and co-organised by Ridzhina Gallery.

Neue Slowenische Kunst or NSK (a German phrase meaning New Slovenian Art), is a controversial political art collective that formed in Slovenia in 1984, when Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. NSK is a large collective consisting of different groups, such as the music group Laibach (German name for Ljubljana), IRWIN (visual art), Cosmokinetic Theatre Noordung (Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre and Red Pilot), New Collective Studio (New Collectivism), Retrovision (film and video), and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy (theory), sometimes represented by same members.

NSK is using symbols drawn from totalitarian or extreme nationalist movements, often reappropriating totalitarian kitsch, in order to show the repetition of those symbols through the history and in the popular culture. (The strategy of Laibach)… “frustrates” the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironiimitation, but over-identification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification suspends its efficiency (Slavoj Žižek, in: Why are Laibach and NSK not fascists? (M’ars, Year 5, nr. 3/4 (1993), p. 3-4)).

Because of the symbols NSK is using in its art, performance and music, it has been often misunderstood for a right-wing movement.