Neue Slowenische Kunst
The artist group NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) [New Slovenian Art] spearheaded one of the most important experiences in the culture that materialised in 1980s Yugoslavia, during the Cold War. NSK was a collective which bound together collectives and groups - Laibach, IRWIN and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre/SNTS – with approaches to a range of disciplines. They conceived a series of departments - New Collectivism, The Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, Retrovision, Film and Builders – which underpinned the theory and practice of the aesthetic principle behind the retro-avant-garde, primarily drawing on influences from the Russian avant-garde, Bauhaus and Fluxus. (2017)
In 1984, three art groups – the multimedia group Laibach (formed in 1980), the visual art group Irwin (1983), and the theatre group the Sisters of Scipio Nasica Theatre (which lasted from 1983 to 1987) – established the movement Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in Ljubljana. At the same time, they created a fourth group, New Collectivism. Other groups later joined NSK, of which the most active one is the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. All the artist groups making up the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) have been greatly concerned with institutions from the outset, in particular the state, the army, the ideological system, capital, and the museum. In order to really understand the workings of the official system and be able to criticize it, they had to themselves become what the object of their critique was – a system. Unlike in Western institutional critique, the NSK were not interested in criticising institutions, but rather wanted to replace them. To this end, they employed the strategies of over-identification, self-historicizing, and the production of reality. (2014)
Events and publications[edit]
- Problemi 23(6): "Neue Slowenische Kunst", Ljubljana: RK ZSMS, 1985, 88 pp. (Slovenian)
- Transcentrala, documentary, dir. Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid, 1993, 20 min.
- Prediction of Fire: A Film About Art, Politics and War [Prerokbe Ognja], dir. Michael Benson, 1996, 90 min. Documentary film. [1]
- Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK, MIT Press, 2005. (English)
- First NSK Citizens Congress, Berlin, 2010.
- Neue Slowenische Kunst (1984–1992): A Historical Perspective, symposium, Tate Modern, London, 2012.
- Zdenka Badovinac, "Neues Slowenisches Museum: An Essay on Institutional Critique and the Production of Institution", Ostblick 3, 2014.
- Simon Paul Bell, Laibach and the NSK: An East-West Nexus in Post-Totalitarian Eastern Europe, Anglia Ruskin University, 2014, 472 pp. PhD thesis.
- Joanna Szczepanik, Geografia artystyczna Neue Slowenische Kunst: wieloaspektowość i kolektywizm, Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2014. (Polish)
- NSK from Kapital to Capital, exhibition, MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, 2015.
- NSK from "Kapital" to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst: An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, eds. Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer and Anthony Gardner, Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015, 600 pp. Publisher. Publisher. Exhibition guide. (English)
- NSK from Kapital to Capital, exhibition, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2017-2018.
- NSK State Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. Newspaper.
- Ivana Bago, "Neue östeuropäische Kunst. The Global Contemporary and the Eastern European Retrocontemporary", in Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization, ed. Octavian Esanu, Routledge, 2020, pp 57-79. [2]
