Irwin. Dreams and Conflicts

On Saturday 15th March 2014 at 5.30pm in the Palazzina dei Giardini venue, the Galleria Civica di Modena will open Dreams and Conflicts, an exhibition dedicated to the Slovenian group IRWIN. Curated by Julia Draganović and Claudia Löffelholz of LaRete Art Projects, promoted and organised by the Galleria civica di Modena and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, the exhibition will constitute the first stage of an exhibition project in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Osnabrück (Germany) and the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art of Gdansk (Poland) where, in 2015, two other exhibitions dedicated to IRWIN will take place.
The story of the Slovenian artists’ collective starts in 1983 with the spontaneous collaboration between young artists from the punk and graffiti scenes in Ljubljana: Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik came together to found the group Rrose Irwin Sélavy, named in honour of the female pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp. In 1984, in collaboration with the music group Laibach and the Gledališče sester Scipion Nasice theatre company, they founded a broader artists’ collective, known as Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK, i.e. New Slovenian Art), which was later to draw in other artists’ collectives ranging from graphics and video art to philosophy...