Irwin - STATE IN TIME

February 2 – April 6, 2008
The Aarhus Art Building
Denmark

For the first time ever the Slovenian art group Irwin will exhibit its works in Denmark. At the exhibition the group presents NSK-State in Time. This continuing communication project presents a utopian state without a concrete territory, but with several thousands of citizens plus formal national symbols such as a flag, stamps, emblems and a passport that everyone is free to obtain. One of the exhibited works, Words from Africa, is a collaborative work between Irwin and nskstate.com.

In Aarhus NSK-State in Time will be documented in the form of video interviews, photographs, articles, artefacts and other kinds of visual material from the nearly 15 years of existence for this state. Recently Esben Hansen a visual anthropologist and film maker collaborated with Irwin on the interviews with NSK citizens. Moreover a passport office will be opened where at selected times during the exhibition period it will be possible to issue an NSK-passport. >Read More

Irwin solo exibition will open in Mala Stanica in Skopje
on Thursday Dec. 6 2007

Irwin presents "East Art Map" and "Mind the Map!"

Irwin will present the East Art Map project at the conference Cultural Versus National Borders on 19-20 February 2007 at Collegium in Budapest.
The conference is organized by the House of World Cultures from Berlin.

Irwin are also doing a symposium in Ljubljana on 20 of February as part of the presentation of the book: Mind the Map! History Is Not Given. A critical anthology based on the Symposium.

Symposium on Art, Ideology and Politics
New generation of Slovenian theoreticians, philosophers, cultural analysts and artists. 
Tuesday, 20 February 2007; noon to 7 p.m.
Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Information center.

The symposium is conceived and organized by: Marina Grzinic and Irwin
supported by the Academy of Fine Arts Ljubljana; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; relations, Berlin and ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana.

East Art Map
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
edited by IRWIN

Reconstructing the missing history of contemporary art, art networks, and art conditions in Eastern Europe from the East European perspective.

The artistic map of Europe contains different degrees of detail and resolution. Italy, France, and Spain are presented in fine grain, but the Balkan peninsula is little more than a vague outline. England, Germany, and Scandinavia have many features filled in, but to the east of Germany things are blurred. Until recently, cities like Sofia, Odessa, Skopje, and Belgrade had next to no definition. Further to the East, Moscow comes into focus, but this is no compensation for the Baltics, sentenced for the last halfcentury to blank space.

In the West, virtually every move of the artist, the art market, and the art public is documented. But in Eastern Europe, no such system of documentation or communication exists. Instead, we encounter systems that are not only inaccessible to the West,
but incongruous from one country to the next. Beside the official art histories there is often a whole series of stories and legends about "unofficial", unapproved art and artists. East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the missing histories of contemporary art in Eastern Europe from an East European and artistic perspective. It is perhaps the widest ranging art documentation project ever undertaken by the East on the East, involving a large network of artists, scholars, curators and critics coordinated by the IRWIN group over several years. >Read More
 

EVERY MINUTE OF THE FUTURE IS A MEMORY OF THE EAST!

Exhibition EAST.ART.MUSEUM in Karl-Ernst-Osthaus-Museum in Hagen

For the recent years, the project EAST.ART.MAP seemed to consist "only" of the abstract idea of -more or less symbolically- writing the history of EAST.ART and a first attempt to establish this history on the internet-platform www.eastartmap.org. From this start, the internet-based version of EAST.ART.MAP has up to now developed to be a profound reference-system about the whole phenomenon of EAST.ART, organized in accordance with the aim of consciously constructing the very history of EAST.ART itself out of the fact that an official history of this art does not exist yet. > read more

IRWIN's "Corpse of Art" at the Joan Miró Foundation

The beauty of failure / The failure of beauty
28 may – 24 october 2004

As part of the programme for the Universal Forum of Cultures 2004 in Barcelona, the Joan Miró Foundation will be showing The beauty of failure / The failure of beauty, an exhibition about how the great dreams – the utopias – that seem so splendid in the abstract are doomed to failure when we try to materialise them, because they presuppose an entirely new, ideal society that can never exist.

IRWIN is taking place at this show with the piece Corpse of Art, 2003 curated by Harald Szeeman.

IRWIN Group Awarded 2004 Jakopic Award

IRWIN were presented with the Jakopic Award, the highest award in Slovene fine arts, in Ljubljana on 21st April. It is awarded by the Association of the Slovenian Painters' Societies, the Museum of Modern Arts, the Fine Arts Academy (ALU) and the Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Critics.

The jury cited IRWIN's introduction of several new artistic methodologies and concepts, particulary the "retroavant-garde". The jury stated that IRWIN's work is located between the poles of abstract and totalitarian art. This is the first prize IRWIN have received in Slovenia and marks an overdue recognition of the group's work.