Irwin works featured at Frieze Art Fair, Gregor Podnar Gallery. Photos by Alexei Monroe.

Marcus Campbell Art Books presents NSK Wunderkammer - a selection of rare and historic NSK works, books and ephemera. There will also be a programme of events including a talk and book presentation by Alexei Monroe on May 14th. More details soon…

Preliminary details and tickets are now available here…

The latest edition of NSK State News is now online featuring previews of the Retrogarde London events. See it here…

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.

This Spring sees two exhibitions, a symposium and a Laibach performance in Tate Modern. This blog will contain news, information and reports on these and related activities, the largest concentration of NSK events in London since 1987.

The main events are:

• March 20th: Opening of NSK 1984-1992 archive show at Chelsea Space.
• April 5th: Opening of Irwin/Folk Art exhibition at Calvert 22.
• April 14th: Symposium Neue Slowenische Kunst 1984-1992 A Historical Perspective, followed by special Laibach performance in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Tickets for the show are available here.

More detailed information on each event will be posted shortly.