I want a passport!

By working in a group the Irwin collective is able to excavate and reiterate the past, through there 'retrogardism'.

The artwork/performance 'Black square on red square' is an example of this retrogardism at work, placing a reproduction of Malevich's Suprematist painting in Moscow's red square, thus giving it a new contextual meaning.

to me the mimesis of history evokes a dangerous state of reverie why? I don't mean dangerous as a bad thing, its important to revitalize and challenge the 'imaging consciousness' and this is what groups like the Irwin collective, NSK, and Laibach are doing. They use a range of tactics irony/parody as vehicles to subvert the system but most importantly as Zizek says ' to be really subversive you must take the system more seriously then it takes itself'

In interrogation machine Zizek writes of the 'inner voice' or the a hidden transgression, I took a Fruedian approach to this thinking perhaps this inner voice is somewhat like the psyches 'Id' something we all know is there but is kept in check in this case by an adherence to a set of unspoken rules, a societal pressure, as Zizek alludes to Jack Nicholson's famous line in a Few Goodmen " you cant handle the truth!" I guess this is the aim of a group like Laibach, to open our eyes.

I will leave you with another example in which the group IRWIN circumvents the traditional sense of a gallery through the creation of a micronation ' the NSK State in time'. I think it is a good example of The IRWIN collective, which is part of The Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), which has had offices since 1992 in Athens and Dublin and most recently in Austria since August this year. Alexei Monroe describes this practice as "a conceptual form of identification for individuals from diverse nationalities" the concept of the fake passports is a good idea, but in practice has proved detrimental to many people, who have tried to actually use said passports, typically i am straying from the topic of conversation but i just thought it was a good example of art revealing the true inequalitys in the world, which is probably what they wanted to do, it just raises the question yet again (just like Tiravanija's work did) does art aiming to deal with social problems inevitably go unnoticed by the general public.