NSK

Neue Slowenische Kunst


In 1984 three groups Laibach, Irwin (founded in 1983) and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (also founded in 1983) joined together to form the Neue Slowenische Kunst, brought together by their shared way of thinking and a similar way of expression through different media. Slovene musicians, painters, actors and designers working collectively under the organisation with a German name producing provocative and influential work as they began addressing the nationalist aspirations surfacing in Yugoslavia. Laibach is the ideological foundation of NSK while the Irwin artists group has the function of NSK biographers recording NSK archetypes on canvas and in history. The Noordung Theater (formerly Red Pilot, and Scipion Nasice before that) assumes ritualistic NSK contexts and operates through religious patterns above all.

June 25th 1991 Slovenia declared itself idependent which led to a 10 day war with the Yugoslavian military. The war moved on more destructively through the rest of former Yugoslavia. In 1992 the NSK redefined itself from an organisation to a state, a state within time and not within boundaries. This new state was declared in 1994 and passports are issued.

As well as Laibach, Irwin and Noordung there is New Collectivism Studio and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, while there is a number of flexible subdivisions which emerge as the need arises and dissolve under their own inertia.