Miran Mohar

Why NeueSlowenischeKunst inGerman?

NSK and its groups never spoke the politicallanguage of the day. This, however, does notmean that we did not respond to aggressivenationalist politics. We did not want to fall victimto the phantoms of the past, being well-awarethat the more that totalitarian and nationalisticsymbols were pushed under the rug andprohibited, the more they assumed diabolicalpower. This was also one of the reasons why, inour paintings, Irwin juxtaposed the motifs andstyles of modernism and contemporary art withtotalitarian art styles and national motifs. Wewere aware that there is a wide space betweenregressive nationalism and esperantointernationalism, and that mere criticism ofnationalism without reflection would not make itdisappear. Interestingly, despite our iconography,we were not of much interest to ultranationalistsin the long run. In fact, they were mostly quitedisappointed and perplexed when they lookedmore closely at us. They attended the events ofNSK and its groups because our iconography wasapparently appealing to them, but its content didnot meet their expectations and they did notknow what to make of it. Because our artisticprocedures and works did not contain a safeironical distance that would be recognizable atfirst glance, we were subject, from the very startof our activity, to numerous accusations of beingnationalists and flirting with totalitarianideologies. In time, such reactions slowly dieddown and became very rare.The NSK art collective was formed in 1984in Yugoslavia by three groups active in the fieldsof visual art, music, and theater: Irwin, Laibach,and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre.1 Later,other groups joined in, among them the designgroup New Collectivism and the Department ofPure and Applied Philosophy. Crucial for NSKsoperations and its development werecollaboration, a free flow of ideas amongindividual members and groups, and the jointplanning of artistic actions. In 1992, the NSKtransformed into the NSK State in Time as aresponse to the radical political changes thatwere taking place in Yugoslavia and EasternEurope at the beginning of the 1990s. In additionto organizing projects such as temporaryembassies and consulates, the NSK State inTime also started to issue its own passports in1993. Currently, there are approximately 14,000NSK passport holders around the world.The NSK State in Time came into being afterthe disintegration of the Socialist FederalRepublic of Yugoslavia, which was marked bywars in the former Yugoslav republics ofSlovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina,as a transnational reaction to the aggressivenationalisms spreading throughout the territoryof ex-Yugoslavia.

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Neue Slowenische Kunst members and friends 1987, Ljubljana.

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IRWIN, NSK Embassy Moscow, 1992, photo: Joe Suhadolnik.

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NSK, NSK State Sarajevo, 1995. Photo: IRWIN archive.

As early as the beginning of the 1980s,Laibach and NSK triggered debates aboutnationalism by using German names, whichclearly caused discomfort on the part of theauthorities. Why the use of the German languagefor new Slovenian art? Why did the Laibachgroup take on the old German name forLjubljana, todays capital of the Republic ofSlovenia? Laibach, in particular, sparked lots ofhostile reactions from the authorities throughoutYugoslavia. For some time in Slovenia, there waseven a ban on the use of the name Laibach,carrying a mandatory fine equivalent to about500 German marks. Here, I must explain thatGerman culture had exerted a huge influence onSlovenian culture for almost one thousand years.But during World War II, Slovenia, like the rest ofYugoslavia, was under German occupation.Slovenians were subjected to aggressiveGermanization and even prohibited from usingtheir language in public. Large numbers ofpeople were killed as hostages or perished inconcentration camps. The role that thisultranationalistic and racist project reserved forSlavic nations was, at best, slave work in EastEuropean fields and factories. Thus, after thetraumatic experience of WWII, the Germanlanguage was understood in Yugoslavia as the

language of the occupier, yet at the same timealso as the language of high culture andphilosophy, the language of Goethe, Hegel,Mann, and others. The use of German in thename Neue Slowenische Kunst indicated thisdouble nature of our experience with the Germancultural and national space.Through our artistic procedures, we alsowanted to provoke debate about nationalconflicts that were swept under the rug afterWWII but erupted violently following the fall ofthe Berlin Wall, particularly in the territory of theformer Yugoslavia. In socialist Yugoslavia, publicdiscussions and reflections on national issueswere taboo. Long-running national conflicts,from the Balkan Wars in the beginning of thetwentieth century through World Wars I and II,were artificially frozen after WWII and thenartificially provoked in the beginning of the1990s by essentially the same politicians whoplayed important roles in socialist Yugoslavia.In the maelstrom of war in Croatia, whenDubrovnik was bombarded from the territory ofthe then Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro, Irwinwas invited to participate in an internationalcontemporary art biennial in Cetinje,Montenegro. We declined the invitation,explaining to the organizer that we did not want

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to be a factor of normalization in a situation inwhich the country hosting the biennial wasconducting aggressive military operations. In thiscase, contemporary art was used as aninstrument of normalization in a national conflictthat escalated into war!

Issuing passports to Bosnians during NSK State Sarajevo, 1995.Photo: IRWIN archive.

The beginning of the war in Bosnia andHerzegovina closely coincided with the openingof our first NSK Embassy in Moscow in May 1992and the founding of the NSK State in Time uponour return to Slovenia. In 1995, at the invitationof artists from Sarajevo, NSK travelled twice tothe besieged city, where Irwin, in collaborationwith the Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art andSarajevo artist Jadran Adamovi, organized aninternational collection of contemporary art (withworks donated by European and Americanartists), which is now part of the collection of ArsAevi, a Sarajevo museum of contemporary art inthe making. When this collection was displayedin Ljubljana in 1996, we also organized, togetherwith the Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art, aninternational symposium of artists andtheoreticians titled Living with Genocide, whichdealt with the question of why the internationalart community could react and critically reflectthe war in Vietnam, but failed to do so in the caseof the Bosnian war.Also, we have always been aware thatcontemporary art (irrespective of its declarativecommitment to transnationalism) andnationalism are not necessarily mutuallyexclusive. There is no need to look very far to seethis. The Venice Biennale is mostly still organizedaccording to national principles, i.e., by nationalpavilions. When Irwin was invited to representSlovenia at the 1993 Venice Biennale, we did notlike the idea of us, as artists, representing anation, i.e., the Slovenian state, so we set the

condition that we would participate in theBiennale only if the NSK State was hosted by theSlovenian pavilion, i.e., only if Irwin waspresented in the pavilion of the NSK State inTime. The Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art, asthe organizer of this event, accepted ourproposal and so we presented ourselves at the1993 Venice Biennale as artists from the NSKState in Time.At the turn of the century, the NSK Stateacquired unforeseeable dimensions. In 2001,Haris Hararis from Athens launched theunofficial NSK website NSKSTATE.COM, whichbecame the central meeting point for NSKcitizens. Around this time, it became clear thatthe citizens had begun to self-organize, bothonline and in the real world. They used theiconographies of the NSK State in Time and NSKgroups as a basis for their own artifacts, actions,and responses. To mention only some of them: inthe United States, filmmaker Christian Matzkeopened, on his own initiative, an NSK library. InReykjavik, NSK citizens organized the NSK Guardof Iceland and opened their own NSK embassy.We decided to support such initiatives, not torestrict them. In 2007, Irwin and NSKSTATE.COMbegan collecting these artifacts and named thisphenomenon NSK Folk Art. These works, made invarious styles and contexts, are oftenunpredictable responses to NSKs work andsymbolism.

IRWIN members interviewing NSK citizens in London, 2007. Photo:Haris Hararis.

Today, the citizenry of the NSK Stateincludes people from seventy countries aroundthe world. They organize themselves via theinternet and NSK rendezvous, as they namedtheir meetings in 2010. The First NSK CitizensCongress, which took place in Berlin in 2010,showed that the citizens were willing to take theNSK State in their own hands. This year, citizen-artists organized the First NSK Folk Art Biennialin Spinerei, in Leipzig, Germany. The exhibition,

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NSK Pavilion, XLV Venice Biennale, 1993. Photo: IRWIN archive.

which presented fifty artists from twenty-twocountries, was seen by around twenty thousandvisitors.

IRWIN, Latest Information, 2007.

Another point to be made about the NSKState in Time is that a large number of NSKcitizens come from Africa. Since 2006, aboutthree thousand people from Nigeria have appliedfor and received NSK passports. Thisphenomenon is obviously linked to the fact thatthe huge majority of Nigerians cannot leave their

country. Here, this contemporary art projectbumped into reality. Of course, we explained tothem that the NSK State is a state without aterritory and that they cannot legally travelacross borders with its passport because it is notan internationally recognized document. We alsowarned them that any attempt to crossinternational borders with this passport mighthave serious consequences, but at the sametime, we did not deny them NSK citizenship.Such a massive number of applications forNSK passports from Africa prompted us to startorganizing interviews with NSK citizens fromfirst, second, and third world countries. Amongthe reasons given for applying for the NSKpassport, some of the interviewees stated thatNSK citizenship enables them to belong to morethan just one state and nation, that with the NSKpassport they can at least partly overcome thislimitation.I see the NSK State in Time as anexperiment that is opening up new spaces ofsocial organization beyond the borders of nationstates. The beauty of this project lies in the factthat its outcomes cannot be predicted. The NSKState in Time is an artifact which has taken on alife of its own, independent of its originalcreators.

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Ljubljana, June 2014

Miran Mohar is an artist based in Ljubljana. He is amember of the IRWIN group and a co-founder of theNeue Slowenische Kunst, the graphic design studioNew Collectivism and the Scipion Nasice SistersTheatre. He is also a lecturer and vice-dean of the AVA,Academy for Visual Arts, Ljubljana.

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1Since theNeue SlowenischeKunst(NSK) art movement haslong ceased to appear in themedia as a collective, afterconsulting with my colleagues Idecided to present my personalviews on the issue ofultranationalism for this editionofe-flux journal through theprism of the experience of NSKand NSK State in Time, of whichI am a cofounder.

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arWhy Neue Slow

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