ABSTRACT
As a project of the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) artists’ collective, the NSK State in Time emerged shortly after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe. This collective grew out of the social and cultural conditions of Yugoslavia in the 1980s. In the wake of long-time leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito’s death, Slovene youth and underground culture clashed with the Yugoslav authorities, while power struggles and rising nationalism across Yugoslavia began to threaten the federation. NSK co-founders and multi-media art/industrial music group Laibach faced censorship for their visual and aural reprocessing of art, ideology and politics. As events in the 1980s accelerated towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia in war, NSK emerged as a multi-faceted entity, with Laibach’s controversial and provocative presence now framed within an expanded collective structure consisting of the artists collective IRWIN, Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre group, New Collectivism design and a Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. The collective’s characteristic appropriation of authoritarianism merged nationalist and totalitarian iconography with pop art and the aesthetics of the early twentieth century avant-gardes. NSK virtually seceded from newly independent Slovenia in 1992 to become a state in time and without borders—a utopian social sculpture embodying a symbolic transcendence of the nationalism engulfing the region. Shortly after its founding, the state began to issue NSK passports and open temporary embassies in apartments and galleries in numerous locations, including Moscow, Sarajevo, Berlin, Ghent, Glasgow and Dublin.
