When the Slovenian painters' collective IRWIN (Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek (†) and Borut Vogelnik) was founded in 1983 in the (then) Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the members were just in their twenties and came from the Ljubljana punk and graffiti scene. Together with the band Laibach, the theater of the sisters Scipion Nasice and the design department Novi Kolektivizem (NK), IRWIN became the main group of the interdisciplinary artist collective New Slovenian Art (NSK) and has been an integral part of the international avant-garde ever since. The result is a highly complex oeuvre of exhibitions, performances, installations and tableaux vivants, manifestos, programs, theoretical texts and hundreds of works that provide answers to the question “What is art?”. 

Iconic works by the collective such as the performance Black Square on Red Square (1992), a 22 x 22m homage to Kazimir Malevich on Moscow's Red Square, as well as the sophisticated collage Freud's Room (Instant Europe) in the evn collection, measuring just 40 x 30 cm, deal with IRWIN's central themes: time, territory, states and borders. The method of their aesthetically and historically oriented working process is the “retro principle”, a conceptual practice based on the appropriation, modification and combination of existing art works. The montages consist of a pastiche of quotations from “Western” art history, international modernism, agitprop and socialist realism, the avant-gardes of Russia and south-eastern Europe, motifs from totalitarian systems and local color elements.

Freud's Room (Instant Europe) consists of a photo of the original Viennese treatment couch of the founder of psychoanalysis in London's Freud Museum, the former home of the fugitive family, as well as pictures and books from the household and maps of former Yugoslavia. IRWIN uses these objects to draw attention to the armed conflict between Bosnia and Herzegovina, which ended with the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 when the collage was created. The numbers 49 and 51 stand for the balance of power that determined the division of the territories between the Croatian-Bosnian domain (51%) and the Republika Srbska (49%).

An inventory label is stuck to the side stating that the collage is a part of the furnishings for the NSK embassy in Beijing. The story of the NSK state begins in 1992, when the New Slovenian Art Collective declared itself a “state in time” without borders and without territory–an abstract organism and a suprematist body. In temporarily opened embassies, consulates and passport offices, friends and supporters of the collective could obtain passports and, like this author, become proud citizens of the NSK state.

In addition to its purely symbolic character, the NSK state was the occasion and stage for international projects by the IRWIN group, such as NSK Embassy Moscow (1992) or Transnacionala - A Journey from East to West (1996). Today, the IRWIN group is one of the last active NSK groups. A grand retrospective of their work was recently shown at the Gregor Podnar Gallery in Vienna. Geography of Times celebrated 40 years of tireless “subversive affirmation” from Ljubljana via Venice, London and Vienna, to Taipei and New York.

Text: Brigitte Huck; Translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh