NSK: Content out of Form

“Postmodern artists talk about blurring boundaries, the boundaries between art and life, sculpture and painting, video and dreaming. NSK blurs the boundaries between politics and art primarily to reveal the lethal effect of the former on the latter.”

– Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“NSK and its groups never spoke the political language of the day. This, however, does not mean that we did not respond to aggressive nationalist politics. We did not want to fall victim to the phantoms of the past, being well-aware that the more that totalitarian and nationalistic symbols were pushed under the rug and prohibited, the more they assumed diabolical power.”

This salon-style exhibition consisted of 61 works in various media by the Eastern European collaborative Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), well known throughout Europe for their avant-garde music and theater performances. NSK began operating in 1984 as an artistic collective united by their aesthetic/political ideals, which they expressed in a wide range of media. In 1992 they founded the State, defined by NSK as a “utopian formation” that “confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind,” with citizenship open to all who abide by its founding principles. Several thousand citizens across numerous countries and all seven continents have joined NSK’s utopian global mission of artistic unity and freedom. Much of their work comments on the political manipulation of art, playing on symbols and themes used in propaganda and showing how art can evoke emotion even in a hypothetical State.

NSK is a collective organization, meaning that individual artists are not identified; instead all work is produced collectively and signed by the group. NSK is widely acknowledged to have played a key role in the pluralization of society and culture in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia by way of their provocative artwork and ideas. This exhibition provides a fascinating opportunity for American audiences to gain a perspective into the transitions of Eastern Europe through the eyes of a group of very insightful and exceptional artists.

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