IRWIN: Photographic Work

IRWIN

IRWIN first exhibited publicly in Slovenia in 1983 and took on the visual arts role within the highly acclaimed Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) collective a year later. IRWIN was founded by five painters, but right from the start they combined a range of different media in their practice, ranging from painting and photography to performance and publishing. The group’s artistic programme is based on what it calls the ‘retro principle’, which involves combining pre-existing images, national symbols and motifs associated with various political regimes, and placing them in new contexts. In so doing, the artists show that images are never neutral, but are invariably constituted within a broader historical and social context.
IRWIN: Photographic Work presents over forty years of the group’s works, highlighting a less well-known strand of their production. For IRWIN, photography functions as part of a broader artistic process: their works often take the form of meticulously conceived situations, actions or installations that are then photographed. In this way, photography becomes more than just a means of documenting an event: it becomes a method for creating and preserving an artwork. One example of this creative approach is their Birds of a Feather project, which drew on the works of the conceptual art group OHO, which was active between 1966 and 1971. OHO’s actions were not usually systematically documented at the time, and have mostly been preserved in plain black-and-white photographs. After re-enacting OHO’s projects as paintings in 1985, IRWIN restaged six of them in 2004, immortalising them in the form of high-quality colour photographs. In so doing, it paid tribute to the OHO group and the role it played in Slovenian art, while simultaneously highlighting some of the issues around art historiography and how artworks come into being, how they are documented and how they acquire and preserve meaning.
Over the course of their long careers, IRWIN have teamed up with numerous artists, photographers and performers who have influenced their works in one way or another. These works include The Mystery of the Black Square (1995) and Golden Smile (2003), two portraits created in partnership with photographers Andres Serrano and Tomaž Gregorič; the triptych Namepickers (1995), featuring Marina Abramović and Bojan Brecelj; and the portrait of Slavoj Žižek photographed by artist Michael Schuster. For IRWIN, authorship is never tied to an individual but to a process that incorporates contributions by various actors and in which meaning is created through collaboration. This approach is particularly apparent in the aforementioned triptych Namepickers, a series of three identical photographs, each of which has a different price depending on the market value of the signatory (either Abramović, Brecelj or IRWIN).
The central section of the exhibition presents NSK State in Time, one of NSK’s most ambitious projects. The NSK State in Time was founded in 1992 as an artistic response to the emergence of new national states in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia. It does not possess any territory: it exists solely in its citizens, in ideological apparatuses such as the military and the church, and in visual codes such as coats of arms, flags, ceremonies etc. To date, it has issued more than fifteen thousand passports, opened several embassies and consulates and organised a wide array of events, thereby imitating the functioning of real states. In the 1990s it opened a number of consulates and embassies, mostly in private homes, hotel rooms etc. in line with the then prevailing trend of aptart, which offered an alternative to official institutions by staging exhibitions in private homes. These venues became state ‘territory’ for the duration of the project, demonstrating that a state does not have to be tied to a geographical space, but can exist in the form of a network of people, relationships and symbols.
Embassies and consulates were the first building blocks of the entity that is the NSK State in Time. In the years that followed, IRWIN’s attempt to explore the constituent parts of the state mostly focused on the military and the church. In 1998 it started working on its NSK Guard project, a series of photographs in which soldiers from various, mostly Eastern European, armies are shown beneath the NSK flag and wearing Malevich’s black cross on their upper arms. The project poses questions about the way in which today’s national armies function, since it requires real soldiers to pose with the insignia of the NSK State in Time, suggesting that, under the right circumstances, armies can switch the flag or coat of arms under which they operate. In a similar vein, the group’s Processions project focuses on religion as one of the key elements in the state system, with IRWIN’s works being incorporated into actual Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant ceremonies in the role of icons or liturgical objects. The project shows that religious systems, like their political counterparts, operate through rituals and images, and explores the ways in which art can become part of them. IRWIN’s most recent exploration of the layers of the state dealt with tourism promotion. For its poster series It’s a Beautiful Country it appropriated six motifs from Yugoslavia’s last major tourist advertising campaign, in the late 1980s, as advertisements for the NSK State, showing that, while political systems and ideologies might change, the methods and visual language used to promote them often remain the same.
IRWIN has always been known for questioning the relationship between original artworks and their reiterations. In its painting series Was ist Kunst (1984–), it developed a visual language that combines various historical art styles and motifs to create new images, which it then mounts in heavy black frames made of tar, wood and coal. By layering historical references, the images highlight the ideological context of art and constantly adapt to the context in which they are exhibited. Over time, IRWIN started framing works by other artists such as Gerhard Richter and Frank Stella. As a rule, such dialogues between IRWIN and other artists were created for single exhibitions and now exist in the group’s oeuvre only as photographs. A selection of these can be seen in the exhibition.
IRWIN: Photographic Work thus offers a comprehensive insight into the group’s artistic practice and, with more than 90 photographs on display, invites us to rethink art and ideology, and the relationship between them. Photography – whether as a simple tool for documentation or a means of propaganda – is used in the group’s work to prompt reflection on art, history and society. At a time of rising nationalism and distorted historical narratives, the exhibition invites visitors to view the displayed images – and perhaps photographic images in general – as fields in which meaning is arbitrarily redistributed and rewritten and the politics of representation are being constantly