IRWIN

The workshop will be based on the main ideas of the group IRWIN exhibition "Back to USA", which responded to the post-revolutionary touring exhibition of "Western art" with the same title and it completely apropriate it. Students will jointly select an exhibition from the Czech history and will create a reenactment on the basis of the documentation, catalogs, or the testimony of participants. Each student will choose one work which she/he will re-create after the original. The first day IRWIN will prepare a lecture for students and teachers, which will bind the topics of the workshop and will deal with methodologies of reenactment, retro and appropriation methods. In conclusion, the results of the workshop will be shown as an exhibitions (perhaps oneday exhibition).

As part of the workshop IRWIN will present a lecture for public at UMPRUM which will be followed by a lecture in tranzitdisplayi:

Thurdays Oct 15 at 12 noon, UMPRUM, room 115, "IRWIN: The line of Eastern Modernism. An overview"

Thurdays Oct 15 at 7 pm, tranzitdisplay, lecture of Slovenian art group IRWIN

Irwin presentation will focus on NSK State in Time, which was founded in 1992 as a transformation of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective into NSK State in Time. NSK was formed in 1984 in Yugoslavia by three groups – Irwin, Laibach and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre. Collaboration, a free flow of ideas between individual members and groups and the joint planning of actions were critical to NSK's operations and its development. NSK State in Time was a response to the radical political changes in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe at the start of the 1990s. Apart from organizing projects such as temporary embassies and consulates, NSK State in Time began issuing passports in 1993. There are currently about 14 000 NSK passport holders around the world. 

The internet was a key tool for spreading the NSK State message. In 1994, NSK's Electronic Embassy Tokyo website was launched and remained active for a few years. In 2001, Athens-based designer Haris Hararis launched the unofficial NSK website NSKSTATE.COM, which became the central meeting point for NSK citizens. Around this time, it became clear that the citizens had begun to self-organize, both online and in the real world. They used the conceptual space and iconographies of NSK State in Time and the various NSK groups as a basis for their own actions and responses. A decision was taken not to restrict such initiatives but to support them. After the First NSK Citizens Congress, which took place in Berlin in 2010, NSK State in Time started to live its own life independently from its creators.

Slovenian group IRWIN is part of a larger artists' collective "Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)", established in 1984. In its artistic projects (Kapital, NSK Embassy Moscow, Transnacionala, East Art Map) the group IRWIN has been involving itself extensively with the art history of Europe, in particular with the ambivalent inheritance of the historical avant-gardes and with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRWIN