- NSK STATE

In Memoriam: Roman Uranjek (1961–2022)

We present an english translation of Tevž Logar tribute to Roman Uranjek

NSK State in Time – A transnational heterotopia?

Dear NSK citizens, My name is Moritz Bühler and I’m studying geography in Mainz, Germany. I decided to write an exam about the NSK State in Time and its relationship towards other spaces and states. Especially the possibility of the NSK State to reflect, represent and invert conventional spaces is what I’m interested in.

Ian Parker responds to the central document of the NSK State Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale

The NSK State Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale takes an unexpected and brave step, locating the NSK State in Time project in cultural-political context, taking responsibility for the resources IRWIN and other components of NSK have mobilised over the past years and giving response to some of the problematic aspects of the project.

N$K: New Life for Old Money

opening of the NSK: Kapital to Capital exhibition at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, members of one of the constituent collectives, Irwin, handed out envelopes marked “N$K”, with a dollar sign. Simultaneously, thousands of miles away in New York, Laibach, one of the other original NSK groups, held a concert where these envelopes were also distributed. Both sets of envelopes contained a new state artifact: NSK State currency.

Basking in the Light of a Black and White Sun

Avi Pitchon: It is no wonder that us delegates of the First NSK Citizen’s Congress do not haste in submitting our reports, for we are destined to serve as poets, and not clerks...

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What have you done for your state today?

Steve Schultz: The “Findings” were adequate if a bit obvious for my tastes, and without much “real” derivation from the original vision of Neue Slowenische Kunst and its later incarnation NSK. So how do we make our mark while keeping the internal book of the Laws and convent?

Art is diplomacy that demands fanaticism

Bertrand Thibert: The cultural earthquake is over, but instead of recovering from it, we have to provoke more of them and move with them

Laibach: Made in Yugoslavia?

Laibach's use of Slovene cultural imagery is well-known, yet this was always balanced and contradicted by a simultaneous and extensive use of Yugoslav references. Even as it asserted Slovene culture in the most spectacular form yet seen it retained an ambivalent relationship with its Yugoslav context.

Every Minute of the Future is a Memory of the East

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

Icons Relocated

Review of IRWIN's exhibition in Saint Gereon's Church in Cologne

XY Unsolved: NSK and Encrypted Culture

Churchill once famously described Russia as "a riddle wrapped inside a mystery wrapped inside an enigma". In the Western political and cultural imagination (or fantasy space), this attitude to "Russia" stands in for "the East" generally, and for all that from a Western perspective is archaic, obscure, or perverse. Churchill's description could equally be applied to NSK, and particularly to Laibach, as an equally fascinating and frustrating presence within the Western popular imagination.

Interrogation Machine: Laibach and The NSK State

What is the best approach to exploring what Laibach, Irwin and the NSK State represent? Fundamentally the work of all NSK groups represents an artistic and also cultural response to the imposed violence of ideology, culture and theory. This perception of violence is present most acutely in Laibach's initial reprocessing of language and ideology and to see how the machine operates it's necessary to return to these traumatic roots.

From the “Red Districts” to the “Golden Smile”

Review of the exhibition "IRWIN-RETROPRINCIP 1983-2003" at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin

Welcome to the Universe of LAIBACHKUNST-Machine!

On 24.07.2003, LAIBACH presented for the first time their new program "WAT" in Delavski Dom in Trbovlje to a selected audience of approximately 600 people, among them NSK-members, -collaborators, -supporters and -fans as well as personally invited people from Trbovlje, family members and reporters of the media, press and TV.

Peter Mlakar on Mount Kum at the Laibach “WAT” premiere party

Address delivered at the after show Laibach “WAT” party by Peter Mlakar on July 24, 2003, in the church of Sveta Neža on Kum

Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical Theater

A week ago today, what has to be one of the most radical theater experiments of the 20th century--and it just barely made it--took place in the skies above Moscow. Slovenian director Dragan Zivadinov's Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical theater unfolded in a Russian cosmonaut training aircraft owned and operated by the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility, which is based in Star City, just outside Moscow. I managed to film the thing and cranked out the following text about it--which I thought might be of interest. Cheers, MB

Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?

The ultimate expedient of Laibach is their deft manipulation of transference: their public (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the "desire of the Other" -what is Laibach's actual position, are they truly totalitarians or not?- i.e., they address Laibach with a question and expect from them an answer, failing to notice that Laibach itself does not function as an answer but a question.