AN APOLOGY FOR MODERNITY - nsk-state-pavilion.net · IRWIN NSK STaTE PavIlION — 57Th vENIcE...

It is cruel to refuse shelter to refugees.But it is much more cruel to make peoplerefugees. The refugees fleeing to Europeare put in an impossible situation of seek-ing help from the perpetrators of their suf-fering and misery. We, the liberal Westernworld, have destroyed their life world.The governments of our states in spacehave done it. We as their citizens are allcomplicit in the crimes our elected andunelected leaders have committed or as-sisted in the regions from which therefugees flee. We as citizens have donenothing effective to prevent or stop thosecrimes from happening. By this omission,we have not only condoned the destructionof the lives of others, but utterly corrodedour own moral and political world as well.In the process, we have become stupid andugly. How are we supposed to help therefugees when we, reduced to powerless-ness, cannot even help ourselves?

NSK, as the state in time, understandsthat the state is the actuality of the ethi-cal idea. The state is the basic conditionfor individuals’ moral and political life,for their freedom. In today’s world, ahuman being is nothing without the state.But the Western liberal governmentshave violated the borders and destroyedstates from Afghanistan to Libya. Thepeople from those countries were forcedto flee our bombs and the violence of ourterrorist proxy armies. When we destroyedtheir states, we reduced them to nothing.For as an old humanist adage goes, si nisicives nisi homo. Having annihilated thesepeople as citizens, we are degrading themas humans even when we give them shelter.Much more often, however, the refugeeshave to submit themselves to insults afterthey have suffered injury.

For the state in time, transgression ofthe bounds of the ethical idea is as seriousas violation of the boundaries for the statein space. It is imperative for NSK as thestate in time that we take a categoricalstance toward these developments. Sincewe cannot expect our Western leaders toact ethically, we take the burden of moralresponsibility and guilt on ourselves andsincerely apologize to the refugees, as wellas to those who were unable to or chosenot to flee, for all the crimes and sufferingwe have inflicted on them.

For the state in time, taking an ethicalstance means opening a political perspec-tive. We need to figure out politically whatis to be done. We must begin to work hardon ceasing to be stupid and ugly, on re-deeming our mind and soul. We need to ad-dress the causes of evil instead of gettinglost in fighting culture wars among our-selves over the effects of the crime. We needto alleviate the humanitarian crisis – thatis self-evident. But it is of no lesser urgencythat we articulate and bring about a long-term political solution. We need to free our-selves from the ultimately criminal powersthat rule us and reestablish democracy inour home countries, and commit ourselveswith all due humility to help restore po-litical life in the countries from which therefugees have fled. We need to stop thesenseless business of destruction and reaf-firm the majesty of the state both in timeand space.

AN APOLOGYFOR MODERNITY

NSK STaTE PavIlION — 57Th vENIcE BIENNalE 2017

Exhibition: Palazzo Ca’ Tron, IUAV University of Venice

Inaugural lecture by Slavoj Žižek

11 May 2017, Aula Magna Tolentini

List of contents

Introduction by IRWIN 2

Zdenka Badovinac and Charles Esche, NSK State Pavilion in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale 3

Editor’s note by Mara Ambrozič 4

Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness 4

Eda Čufer, It is Time to Rethink the State: On NSK State 5

Slavoj Žižek, Es Gibt Keinen Staat In Europa 8

Ahmet Öğüt’s statement 9

Delegates 9

Workshops 10

Claudio Donadel, Beyond Borders 11

NSK Officers 12

Róza El-Hassan, Whom shall we ask for amnesty? 13

Jela Krečič, The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left 14

Biographies 14

NSK State Venice Pavilion in Vienna 15

How to get there 16

Impressum 16

NSK STaTE PavIlION NEwSPaPEr – frEE cOPywww.NSK-STaTE-PavIlION.Org

The text Apology for Modernity was sent by email to a sample of1500 NSK citizens who were asked to respond with answers:yes, I agree with this statement or No, I don’t agree with thisstatement. The results of this small inquiry are (at the time of print-ing, 25.04.2017) as follows: 86,5 % voted yES, 9 % voted NO.4.5% of answers were undefined. Since we do not have all theemail addresses we would like to encourage NSK citizens tosend their vote along with their passport number to the followingaddress: [email protected]. your vote will be strictly confidential.

11 May – 15 July 2017

Commissioned by IRWIN

Curated by Zdenka Badovinac and Charles Esche

Installation by Ahmet Öğüt

2

NSK STATE PAVILION IN

THE CONTExT OfTHE 57TH VENICE

BIENNALENSK State in Time, which was established in1992, has more than 15,000 citizens today andtheir numbers keep growing. Although it is truethat in terms of population size NSK State inTime cannot compare to most other states, onecan claim that in terms of the structure of its cit-izens it is already a superpower in the field ofcontemporary art. Its citizens include a numberof exceptional, world renowned artists, art theo-rists and curators, who even the world’s mostdeveloped countries in this field would envy usfor. So it was not hard for us to find amongNSK citizens a top team of curators and invitethem to present the remarkable achievements ofNSK citizens in the NSK State Pavilion, whichwill be put on display this year for the first timein Venice, along with the pavilions of eighty-four other countries. The selected curators weregiven total freedom in formulating the conceptand theme of the exhibition and in selecting theparticipating artists, activists and theorists. Andwe have tried our best to help them realize theirideas as fully as possible.

We thank Zdenka Badovinac and CharlesEsche for their enthusiasm and commitment inconceiving and developing the project, for theircourage in accepting our invitation to participatein such a risky project, as well as for the trustthey have thus placed in us.

Due to its specific concept, the project alsoinvolves a number of outstanding collaboratorswithout whom the project would simply nothave been possible. Ahmet Öğüt is the author ofthe exhibition's installation, which has by faroutgrown the functionality of a design, becom-ing an autonomous work of art. The delegatesBisan Abu Eisheh, Azra Akšamija, DjordjeBalzamovic, Safia Dickersbach, Claudio Don-adel, Michael fehr, Róza El-Hassan, KendellGeers, Sarah Lunaček, Sohrab Mohebbi, VictorMutelekesha, Ahmet Öğüt and Malina Sulimanhave enabled communication between the proj-ect and the individuals who have personal expe-rience of migration. Slavoj Žižek will give alecture entitled The Courage of Hopelessness atthe opening of the NSK State Pavilion and JelaKrečič has proposed to publish a collection oftexts entitled The Final Countdown: Europe,Refugees and the Left, which will shed a criticallight on the central theme of the project. Shewill also select the texts and edit the publication.Tomaž Mastnak has proposed and authored thetext An Apology for Modernity. Claudio Donadel,a specialist in migration policies, who wasasked to help in the realization of the project,has not only interceded in communication between the curators and local associations –

and with the help of the latter opened the possi-bility for the humanitarian protection applicantsaccommodated in the Veneto Region to partici-pate in the project – but also recognized in thisspecific art project a potential channel for dis-seminating information about the issues relatingto migrant communities. In his written proposalhe presents an innovative program for cross-border cooperation and implementation of a reception policy based on the vast experienceof Italian civil associations in this field and theproblems resulting from inadequate collabora-tion offered to Italy by the rest of Europe in thisrespect. The curators of the exhibition recog-nized his proposal as an important contributionto the entire installation. We extend our utmostthanks to all the above-mentioned individualsfor their significant contributions to the articula-tion of the project.

We are also grateful to all who have madethis project possible. Just as we would havehad a hard time undertaking the project withoutthe support of the a/political foundation, wecould not have finished it without the coopera-tion and support of Blaž Peršin and Museumand Galleries of Ljubljana; Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin; Wiener festwochen, Vienna;Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia;Department of Culture of Municipality of Ljubljana; RPS d.o.o.; KD funds; Stratkom;VOKA Ljubljana; IUAV University of Venice;Co.Ge.S. Cooperative for Immigration Policies,Mestre; NSK State Reserve, New York; andUBT University Pristina.

We thank Anton Vidokle and e-flux for theirgenerous media support as well as WolfgangSchlag and Birgit Lurz for their decision topresent the NSK State Pavilion in Vienna. Last but not least, we express our heartfeltthanks to Mara Ambrožič for her dedicated andprofessional work as the project’s director, whowatched over the entire project together with us.

We would also like to express our thanksto Ajhan Bajmaku, Katharine Carl, Eda Čufer,Mateja Demšič, Alberto felenga, Chiara figone,Branko filipič, Matjaž Gantar, Edmond Hajrizi,Sanja Kuveljić Bandić, Tevž Logar, KrištofMlakar, Anton Peršak, Agnese Pierobon, GregorPodnar, Darko Pokorn, Mara Rosseti, BeckyShirwan, Andrei Tretyakov, Angela Vetteseand franci Zavrl.

We extend our thanks to all the participantsfor their contributions to this unique project,which we believe will attract a lot of interestamong the public of the 57th Venice Biennale,and are at the same time grateful to all of themfor making possible the most complex appear-ance of the NSK State in Time in space so far.

Commissioners IRWIN

NSK STaTE PavIlION — 57Th vENIcE BIENNalE

Palazzo ca’ Tron, view from the grand canal, venice (Italy),courtesy the artists, 2017

3NSK STaTE PavIlION — 57Th vENIcE BIENNalE

NSK STATE IN TIMEPAVILION

BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2017

The first NSK State in Time Pavilion wrestleswith its concrete time and place: 2017, WestCentral Europe, Veneto, the Venice Biennale.Surrounding us on all sides are pavilionsrepresenting the states that divide up thisworld between them. Before us, are thestateless, the displaced, the migrants and therefugees who cannot or will not fit into thisscheme of belonging – or not yet, at least.Behind us is the unparalleled architecturalgrandeur of Venice as perhaps Europe’s firstmodern state as well as a more general European history of exercising power and of national, religious and ethnic division thatdrove its colonial adventures and modernstatecraft since the first time that the Muslimswere driven out of Western Europe in 1492.

NSK’s State in Time offers a different per-spective to think about the world. It is notin competition with spatial states so it canrethink what being and belonging mightmean. It has an open idea of what citizenshipmight signify and it offers that citizenshipas a complementary identity that exists inparallel to nationality. The ownership ofNSK papers is also not yet defined either by rights or responsibilities, though citizenscould at any time start to assert them. Thisstate-of-becoming is crucial to the status ofthe NSK state, one that smells of potentialbecause it is free from the weight of thecrimes of older states. It can breathe the airof statehood without choking.

We were invited to be the curators by theIRWIN, the commissioners of the pavilion.Our immediate question was how to makethe promise of the NSK state tangible; howto give it a body that looks, sounds and actsdifferently to all the other state pavilionsand that does what only an artists’ state mightbe able to do. To that end, we turned first tothe citizens of the state for help and invitedAhmet Öğüt to work with us on the formand content of the pavilion. More broadly,we looked towards the people who have, inone way or another, experienced migration:that process of leaving one's home to try tobuild another. for migrants, state and na-tionality are unlikely to be the uncomplicatedbirthright of folk that have stayed where theywere born. In a somewhat perverse way, theyhave the advantage of a bifocal perspective;one that can look at two different conditionsor cultures and perceive each in greater depththan could ever be possible with a single eye.We wanted to address this relational perspec-tive directly by asking a number of citizendelegates to choose people in their circle thatwere willing to answer four questions. Theanswers could be in any medium and anytone of voice they chose.

The questions were:

What do you want to take with you from European heritage(as you understand it) to help build a new and better world?

What do you want to forget ordelete from European heritage (as you understand it) to avoidrepeating the mistakes of the past?

What do you want to take with you from the heritage of your owncountry (as you understand it) tohelp build a new and better world?

What do you want to forget ordelete from the heritage of yourown country (as you understand it)to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

Thanks to the advice of Djordje Balmazović and to aid communication across so many language barriers, we sometimes simplified the questions to:

What do you think is good (or future) in Europe?

What do you think is not good in Europe?

What do you think is good (or future) in your own country?

What do you think is not good in your own country?

The various replies to these questions formthe first section inside the pavilion with theoverall title New Symbolic Disorder. Herethe representations of the world according tomigrants are gathered, assembled and shared.But the pavilion will try to look beyond thedark horizon of the present and attempt toimagine a new community. To do so, it needsto be more than just a space of exhibition andreflection. Presenting an artists’ state for thefirst time, we felt it had to act in the presentand not only work with representations ofreality. Therefore, working together as ateam, we made contact with the organizations(Co.Ge.S., Mestre and Common Ground,Venice) that support recent migrants to theVeneto area and through them invited newparticipants who were willing to work onpresenting the pavilion to the public andopening a discussion about migration, citizen-ship, heritage and identity. Their tasks includethe official act of issuing citizenship to thosemembers of the public wishing to apply.

The final core element is present withinthe newspaper available from the Pavilion.This is a text proposed and authored byTomaž Mastnak. It is a formal state apology,a gesture that has been made by a numberof European and post-colonial states in the recent past. This apology accepts, on behalf of the state, the burden of a collective modern past and seeks to apolo-gise not just for one specific incident butrather to address the whole of colonial andneocolonial global relations that we cancall modernity. The nexus of modernity-coloniality is often falsely separated intoright and wrong or good and bad. Here,modernity is the ghost that refuses to die,as evidenced by contemporary migrationpolitics and inequality. The NSK Apologyfor Modernity is therefore a recognitionof the failure of modernity in the presentand a step towards shaping a new kind offuture. It is also a plea to speed our collec-tive detachment from the belief in moder-nity/modernism and all that it has come torepresent in the early 21st century acrossthe world, and in the first place an apologyfor the current geopolitics and Westerndominance that have broken the backs ofso many post-colonial states since the endof the Second World War.

Accompanying the pavilion and extendingits context and content at every level is alecture by Slavoj Žižek on 11th May 2017and a book edited by Jela Krečič called TheFinal Countdown: Europe, Refugees andthe Left. More information about all theparticipants can be found in this newspaper.The NSK Pavilion is an independent project,commissioned and produced by IRWIN, co-produced by the Museum and Galleriesof Ljubljana, and co-organised by TempleProductions, Paris and Društvo NSK Informativni center, Ljubljana.

CuratorsZdenka Badovinac, Charles Esche

EDITOR’S NOTE

This newspaper has been structured in orderto draw the whole operation proposed by the curatorial team together, including the work of artist Ahmet Öğüt and the hundred NSKDelegates involved. Introduced by the com-missioners IRWIN, the main topic is explainedand expanded in the contribution written byBadovinac and Esche. The curators’ text is followed by Slavoj Žižek’s announcement of the theme of his inaugural lecture, which will accompany the opening of the NSK Pavilion.

The historical and theoretical frame around the NSK State is dealt with in an essay by EdaČufer – one of the founding members of NSK –which contextualises the emergence and exis-tence of the new state. The second historicalfocus is given through the reprint of Žižek’s arti-cle written in 1993 – one year after the creationof the NSK State – in a period marked by thecivil war, which led to the final dissolution ofthe Socialist federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A statement by Ahmet Öğüt brings us back tothe present, and introduces this year’s Paviliondesign, conceived as a direct interpretation ofthe curatorial concepts guiding the project;alongside, names of all NSK Delegates involved.The newspaper then opens up a specific sectionhighlighting the social dimension of the process,which plays an important role within the project.first, a note introduces the methodology andstructure of the workshops that took place inorder to create a model of cooperation betweenthe social and cultural spheres. Next, DelegateClaudio Donadel presents a short version of hisproject proposal Beyond Borders, a transna-tional reception model for asylum seekers basedon a widespread territorial reception system.This section closes with the presentations of theNSK Officers (Amarjotpal Kaur, Mercy Nwafor,Abraham Ohamhen and Charles Tawiah), whowill play a key role within the project, beingdirectly involved in the running of the Pavilionand issuing NSK Passports throughout theperiod. The newspaper also contains an articlewritten by Delegate Róza El-Hassan as aresponse to the curators’ questionnaire, wherethe artist calls for the need to provide amnesty. In the last section, two important parallel projectsare presented. first, the publication editedby Jela Krečič The Final Countdown: Europe,Refugees and the Left, whose exceptional con-tributions deal with the major political problemsof today’s geopolitical situation. Second, thepresentation of the NSK State Venice Pavilion inVienna – Thinking Europe, a collateral project,curated by Birgit Lurz and Wolfgang Schlag,which will open in May 2017.

Distributed free of charge at the NSK StatePavilion and in other venues in the city ofVenice, the newspaper is also available in otherPavilions like Bosnia and Herzegovina andRepublic of Kiribati, and as well as online.

EditorMara Ambrožič

4

The lines from Joel 3:14 – “Multitudes,multitudes, in the valley of decision! for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.” – provide the first accurate description of the moment when a society is at a crossroads, confronted with a choice that may decide its fate. This is the situation of Europe today.

Every anti-immigrant populist wouldfully agree with this claim: yes, Europe’svery identity is threatened by the invasionof Muslim and other refugee multitudes. But the actual situation is exactly the oppo-site: it is today’s anti-immigrant populistswho are the true threat to the emancipatorycore of the European Enlightenment. A Europe where Marine le Pen or GeertWilders are in power is no longer Europe.So what is this Europe worth fighting for?

The true novelty of the french Revolutionresides in the distinction between citizen’s rightsand human rights. One should reject here theclassic Marxist notion of human rights as therights of the member of bourgeois civil society.While citizens are defined by the political orderof a sovereign state, “human” is what remainsof a citizen when he/she is deprived of the citi-zenship, finding him/herself in what in artilleryone calls the open space, reduced to the abstracttalking body. Recall the Calais camp before itwas dismantled – as Jean-Claude Milner wrote,“those who are assembled there from 2000 arenot guilty of anything, they are not accused ofanything, they do not infringe upon any part ofthe law; they are simply there and they live.”It is in this sense that the universal human rightsshould remain our regulative when we negotiatethe difficult relationship between the constraintsof citizenship and particular ways of life. Withoutthis compass we inevitably regress to barbarism.

NSK, NSK Chart, 1984


NSK CHART

THE COURAGE Of HOPELESSNESS

Slavoj Žižek

Eda Čufer

In 1984 three art groups based in former Yugoslavia merged into a largercollective ‘body’ and adopted the nameNeue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).1

The name was chosen to extend thesuccessful code-playing deployedby one of the constituent groups’choice of name; specifically the groupLaibach had adopted the Germanname for the city of Ljubljana, whereNeue Slowenische Kunst was foundedand where it is still based. In thepost-WWII historic context – wheresovereign European socialist andliberal democratic States constitutedtheir moral and political values onthe military defeat of Nazi Germany –Neue Slowenische Kunst functionedas a “double code”, its meaning andmessage hidden in contentious contra-diction between the denotative mean-ing of the statement (New SlovenianArt) and the medium in which it wasexpressed (the German language).

NSK State emerged from theeclipse of two other States: thedecline of socialist Yugoslavia bythe end of the 1980s and the subse-quent inauguration (in 1991) of theindependent democratic State ofSlovenia. These events were part of a larger historic breakdown of theSocialist States in Eastern Europewhich for most of the twentieth century represented an alternative to the monopoly capitalism of theso-called ‘first world’.

The emergence of the NSK Statein the 1990s had its conceptual her-itage in NSK of the 1980s, which is tosay, among other things, that it wasn’tlooking to provide unambiguous an-swers or definitive readings, but ratherto ‘itself’ function as a “question” (asSlavoj Žižek has posited), or as an“interrogation machine” (as AlexeiMonroe has suggested), transferringthe entire responsibility for the pro-duction of meaning and message tothe reader or spectator. While the idealNSK witness was expected to stronglyreact to the audio-visual and linguisticmaterials that were offered for culturalconsumption, and to produce themeaning of her or his experiencethrough emotional and intellectualstruggle, we as NSK members had toaccept and strictly obey Laibach’score principles “of conscious rejectionof personal tastes, judgments, convic-tion” and “free depersonalization”.

NSK consciously eclipsed the subjec-tivity of the author with the object ofcreation, giving up control over finalform, expression or intention of theso-called ‘artwork’, while in returnachieving access to realms of historicuncertainty where the actual NSK ‘artworks’ were formed and performed.

NSK strategies were looking forways to break through the screenof reality owned by contemporary‘artificial body-soul politic’ and toinflict, at least momentary, cognitiveand somatic splits and reversals. Thereversals achieved by the strategy of‘doubling’ performed the function ofempowering the spectators of NSK’sspectacles to see and recognize them-selves, not as spectators but as socialagents who, whether they liked it ornot, found themselves acting like to-tally alienated dummies animated bythe soul of the invisible ventriloquist.

The transformation of NSK toNSK State in Time was a deliberateapplication of NSK’s technique of‘doubling’ onto the irrevocably changedpolitical and historic landscape. NSKState in Time mimics the process of‘becoming’ a State while, by proclaim-ing itself to be an exterritorial andsupranational entity, evading the trapof becoming a building block forSlovenia’s anachronistic nationalstatehood and its pathetically heroicmythologies. By the same token, itcatapults itself back to the open-endedcontinuum of history and continues“interrogating” the ‘new millennium’ssoul’ and its multitudes of implodingcontradictions. NSK State in Timeconnects the history of the twentiethcentury with historic possibilities andnecessities of the twenty-first century.In an uncanny twist of history the NSKState placed itself into emerging his-toric realms characterized by unfath-omable contradictions and pointed topossible forms of future “inverted to-talitarianism.”2 The unrestricted move-ment of financial ‘Capital’, which nowqualifies as a new global and transcen-dent Sovereign, is gradually taking theplace of “waning sovereignty” of thenational liberal State. Capital alone, asWendy Brown reminds us in her recentbook, “appears perpetual and absolute,increasingly unaccountable and primor-dial, the source of all commands, yetbeyond the reach of the nomos (exter-nally codified set of rules): a form ofSovereignty but without a Sovereign.”3

Art and politics in the 20th centurybecame fused to the point that it was nolonger possible to unambiguously locatethe borders between them. The old artthat we knew and loved, it was claimed,symbolically died in 1913, when Kazimir Malevich conceived the BlackSquare and Marcel Duchamp intro-duced his first ready-made to the world.4

With WWI, the disintegration ofAustro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russianempires, the October revolution, andthe “specter” of communism which fordecades had already haunted the world,the era of classical colonialism cameto an end and an entirely new era ofexpropriation and exploration began.Just as Bicycle Wheel and Black Squaremarked a turning point in “art history”,so too did WWI represent a fundamen-tal point of transition in “world history”– a moment when the world as anobject of exploration and colonizationfrom the 15th century on finally be-came depicted, mapped and owned.5

It would only be a matter of time untilCapitalism, arriving at its fully devel-oped corporate stage, would discovera use-value of the “inverted” lands,and perfect the ways to explore andexploit them.

Duchamp and Malevich producedtheir “empty signifiers” at the begin-ning of the 20th century – the cen-tury, as we have already noted, thatintroduced an eerie object capableof bringing the spectral presence ofthe entire globe into people’s livingrooms. Withholding all content forpositivist interpretation and identifi-cation, their empty icons shifted theentire discussion about the “state ofart” elsewhere. Instead of depictingan object to be looked at, BicycleWheel and Black Square depictedthe dispositive which would definethe visual, fetish and discursiveregimes of the 20th century. Offeringthemselves more as objects of inter-pretation than as objects of visualconsumption, these two icons accu-mulated meanings that would funda-mentally inform the differencesbetween two dominant and compet-ing types of society as they viewedeach other through the mirror of theCold War.

1 The three original constituent founding groups ofNSK are: Laibach (1980), Irwin (1983) and ScipionNasice Sister’s Theatre (1983)

2 The term “inverted totalitarianism” was coined by Sheldon S. Wolin and developed in his book Democracy Inc. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2008. It describes a seemingly “ideal type” of government that the USA developed after WWII and during the Cold War.

3 Wendy Brown. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.New York: Zone Books, 2010.

4 Gérard Wajcman. Objekt stoletja. Ljubljana: Analecta,2007 (L’Objet du siècle. Éditions Verdier, 1998).

5 This idea can be found in John Berger, The Success &Failure of Picasso. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

5

IT IS TIME TO RETHINK THE STATE: ON NSK STATE

Neue Slowenische Kunst members and friends,ljubljana (Slovenia), courtesy NSK, 1986


Boris Groys proposed looking atBlack Square as if it represented a riteof passage of art, from the sphere of“positive reality” (objective) into thesphere of “negative reality” (virtuality),epitomizing the immersion of Sovietavant-garde art into the virtual worldof Stalinist Gesamtkunstwerk.6 BlackSquare, according to this interpreta-tion, represents the world objectifiedin the Soviet totalitarian State knownfor its absorption of art (as an agencyof the subject) and for the State itselfbecoming a Subject and Artist instead.

Bicycle Wheel on the other hand,records the absorption of art into anautonomous art system, which wor-ships the “pendulum of alienation”and feeds on self-recursive criticismand negation. By shifting attentionaway from the power of meaning andmessage inherent in the art object to the instrumental power of thevalue-creating art system, Duchamp’swork in the first decades of the 20th

century served to open the door to theart of conceptualism in the 1960s andbeyond. Living in the saturated tele-information society, artists of the sec-ond half of the 20th century understoodthat as a consequence of the increasedaestheticization and virtualization ofliving environments, art could continueto signify as art only by reverting thedefinition of art and entering into asphere of “life itself”.

NSK in the 1980s transformedinto “NSK State in Time” at a mo-ment of high social anxiety andblinding collisions between the de-clining models of the 20th century au-thoritarian state (epitomized inYugoslavian bloodshed), conceptu-ally and historically regressive andoutlived models of the national State(exemplified in the inauguration ofthe independent state of Slovenia)and the hastening policies of pan-European integration and the aggres-sive invasion of predatory Westernneo-liberal economic interestssearching for new, “virgin” markets.

Before anybody in Eastern Europewoke up from the hangover of transi-tion, we were already interpellatedinto a restored globally imposed classsystem in which everyone has aclearly delineated place and say.In the newly reified international and global relations, the passport immediately started to function as a brand. (“Made in Slovenia”. Youmean Slovakia?) Suddenly we wereon the map, but we didn’t recognizeourselves in the patterns in whichwe were recognized by Others.

One event during the twentyyears existence of NSK State in Timedeserves special mention. from 1992to 2004, most of the applicants forthe NSK State in Time passport werepeople involved with contemporaryart, culture and western discourse. The NSK passport’s meaning and interest was contextualized in partby the changing map of Eastern Europe, and the new independent

states that were formed followingthe breakup of some of its previousones (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,Soviet Union). The largest number of passports were issued in Sarajevoat the end of the war in 1995, and although some NSK passport holdersused their passports – which success-fully reproduced the look of standardsovereign state passports – to actuallypass state borders in Europe and NorthAmerica, the majority of passportholders understood its use-value as anart object, even when using it for non-art purposes. But in 2004 somethinghappened that would radically changethe meaning of the NSK passport.Suddenly, thousands of NSK passportapplications started arriving at NSKheadquarters in Ljubljana from theAfrican state of Nigeria, specificallyfrom the densely populated metropoli-tan region of Ibadan. for the Nigerianusers, the NSK passport was not un-derstood as an object of art, but as alegitimizing form of self-identificationand self-registration. When inter-viewed, some of the NSK passportholders from Nigeria later said that

they had “heard” that NSK is a beauti-ful country and wanted to travel there.The Slovenian embassies in the regionstarted getting overwhelmed by phonecalls from these new NSK citizensasking questions about visas and theirrights of citizenship. Eventually thesituation grew to the point that theSlovenian foreign Ministry askedNSK members to write an explanationclearly stating that “NSK is not a ‘real’State but an ‘art’ State”, and that theNSK passport is not a valid documentfor crossing state borders or applyingfor visas. They published the statementon their website and advised NSK tospread the same information throughtheir own channels as well as in theNigerian media.

The Nigerian people’s “over-identification” with the passport as asymbol of rights and privileges guar-anteeing its holder a share in the sys-tem of legal protection, mobility andan identity and status that is lackingwithout affirmation by documents,points to a disturbing absence of suchrights and privileges for vast popula-tions inhabiting the 21st century earth.

6 This idea was a central subject of Groys’s early workGesamtkunstwerk Stalin. See also Groys’s chapter onIlya Kabakov in History Becomes Form: MoscowConceptualism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

6

NSK, NSK State Sarajevo (Bosnia and herzegovina), courtesy NSK, 1995

NSK Embassy Moscow (conceptualized andorganized by IrwIN), Photo JožeSuhadolnik, courtesy NSK, 1992


7

On the other hand the passport,invented in the era of classical colo-nialism and national state building,might just as well become obsoleteas a form of identification as newtechnologies implement checkpointsystems that permeate secular spaceand introduce surveillance mechanismsat almost any transactional threshold –cash register, hospital reception, bankmachine, commercial website, evenprivate home. An organ such as the‘eye’, which was ‘The Organ’ ofwestern modernity and its representa-tional dispositive (but in a role of theinstrument belonging to the subject),now itself becomes an object to beidentified, (but with the identificationbeing performed by the authority ofthe machine, which can “see” intothe darkness of the flesh of which thehuman eye is made). The merging ofpolitical, legal, economic and culturalaspects of identity into one form ofdigital payment-identification docu-ment (a fusion of today’s credit cardand passports) is imminent. In the nearfuture, physical movement may be-come more complicated and restrictedthan ever before. “The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within anopen environment at any given in-stant, is not necessarily one of sciencefiction. felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able toleave one's apartment, one's street,one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s(dividual) electronic card that raisesa given barrier; but the card couldjust as easily be rejected on a givenday or between certain hours; whatcounts is not the barrier but the com-puter that tracks each person’s posi-tion – licit or illicit – and effects auniversal modulation.”7

The mere facts of existence of theapplicants and NSK passport holdersfrom Nigeria are in painful conflictwith this vision of the future. As thedebates that took place during thefirst NSK Citizens Congress in Berlinin 2010 made clear, the inhabitants oftoday’s world are not yet equipped tonavigate between these new forms ofcontrol and exclusion. Non-art crowdpeople are buying the NSK passportnot to enjoy it as a little “Rembrandtmasterpiece” but because they need touse the canvas as an “ironing board.”8

The two crowds (art and non-art)are however brought together by the same object, which, as Hansi Momodu insisted, indicates that in the final analysis we all aspire to the same ideal and necessity of the redefined future State which will be responsive to the challenges andneeds of global citizenship.9

The evolutionary function of sovereign a national State is histori-cally inseparable from its colonialheredity exemplified by permanent violation of the civil rights of those whowere not eligible to its membership.The paradox of the State thus remainsachingly real in today’s world, espe-cially if contemplated through theurgency of global justice. It is timeto rethink the State (and the best wayto rethink it is to remake it).

7 Gilles Deleuze. Postscript on the Societies of Control.October 59. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

8 I’m referring to Duchamp’s example of the “reciprocalready made” where Rembrandt’s masterpiece is usedas an ironing board.

9 Hansi Momodu expressed this opinion in herunpublished interview with Borut Vogelnik at thefirst NSK’s Citizens Congress.

IrwIN, First NSK Citizens Congress, Berlin,October 2010, Participants. Photo: christianDitsch, 2010

NSK from Kapital to Capital, edited by ZdenkaBadovinac, Eda Čufer and anthony gardner,MIT Press, cambridge, Ma (uSa), 2015

NSK, NSK Passports, courtesy NSK, 2017


8

for many long years in left-wing (andnot only left-wing) mythology theState appeared as the original sourceof Evil, as a living dead sponging offthe body of the community. The re-pressive, particularly ideological ma-chinery of the State was presented asthe process of supervising and main-taining discipline, as armour shapingthe healthy body of the community.The utopian perspective, which hence-forth opened up towards both the radi-cal left-wing as well as the antiliberalright-wing, was the abolition of theState or its subordination to the com-munity. Today’s experience, summedup in the word “Bosnia”, confronts uswith the reality of this utopia.

What we are witnessing in Bosnia isthe direct consequence of the disinte-gration of State authority or its submis-sion to the power play between ethniccommunities – what is missing inBosnia is a unified State authority ele-vated above ethnic disputes. A similartendency can be observed in Serbiawhere we are again dealing with a statewhich is not based on the modern con-cept of nationhood, but has fused withthe pre-state ethnic mix, and thus inKosovo paradoxically in the same terri-tory two states coexist: the Serbian stateauthority and the para-State agencies ofthe Republic of Kosovo. The old left-wing disinclination towards the rule oflaw and order has thus come face toface with its own truth, manifested inBosnia and Serbia where unsupervisedlocal warlords are plundering, killingand settling private scores. In contrastto expectations it has become clear thatthere is nothing liberating about thebreaking of state authority – on the con-trary: we are consigned to corruptionand the impervious game of local inter-ests which are no longer restricted by aformal legal framework.

In a certain sense “Bosnia” is merelya metaphor for Europe as a whole. Europe is coming closer and closer to a state of non-statehood where statemechanisms are losing their bindingcharacter. The authority of the stateis being eroded from the top by thetrans-European regulations from Brussels and the international economicties and from the bottom by local andethnic interests, while none of theseelements are strong enough to fullyreplace state authority.

Thus, Etienne Balibar has altogetherappropriately labeled the current situation in Europe with the syntagma“Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa”(“There is no State in Europe”).

from all this it is thus necessary todraw what at first glance seems aparadoxical, yet crucial conclusion:today the concept of utopia has madean about-face turn – utopian energyis no longer directed towards a state-less community, but towards a statewithout a nation, a state which wouldno longer be founded on an ethniccommunity and its territory, thereforesimultaneously towards a state without territory, towards a purely artificial structure of principles andauthority which will have severed the umbilical chords of ethnic origin,indigenousness and rootedness.

As far as art, according to definition, is subversive in relation to the existingestablishment, any art which todaywants to be up to the level of itsassignment must be a state art in theservice of a still-non-existent country.It must abandon the celebration of islands of privacy, seemingly insulated from the machinery of authority, and must voluntarily become a small cog in this machinery,a servant to the new Leviathan, which it is summoning like the genie from the bottle.

This text was included in IRWIN’s catalogue, published by Moderna Galerija to accompany the hosting of the NSK Pavilion as part of the Slovenian Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale, 1993.

Postering action for IrwIN’s exhibition in the NSKproto-pavilion in the house of Eleonora Manteseduring the 42nd venice Biennale. Photo DarkoPokorn, courtesy of the author, 1986

IrwIN, Plaque of the NSK Pavilion hosted by theSlovenian Pavilion, 46th venice Biennale, ateneodi San Basso, (commissioner Zdenka Badovinac),courtesy of the artists, 1993

ES GIBTKEINEN STAAT IN

EUROPA

Slavoj Žižek


DESIGNINGTHE

NSK STATE PAVILION

Ahmet Öğüt

When analyzing the strategies of NSK (NeueSlowenische Kunst), Alexei Monroe changesHakim Bey’s term TAZ (Temporary AutonomousZone) into Temporary Hegemonic Zone. In early1992, shortly after the collapse of Socialism and the tumultuous break-up of Yugoslavia, the NSKState in Time emerged at a moment when a radicalrethinking of the nation state was necessary, and yet it did not manifest itself geopolitically. The NSKState in Time’s legacy of temporary embassies – that previously took place in Moscow, Tirana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Berlin and many other cities –will continue with the NSK State Pavilion, whichwill be governed in collaboration with HumanitarianProtection Applicants, Sans Papiers, and statelessindividuals. Designing the NSK State Pavilion hasbeen a productively challenging task that took intoconsideration the urgencies of the present politicalclimate. The notion of the State, the definition of citizenship and the Kafkaesque elements of bureau-cracy will be questioned through the conceptual and physical experience of gravity. The space willbe experienced in different parts: ‘An Apology’, aroom including over 100 responses from contribu-tors, and an NSK Passport Office. The NSK StatePavilion will be designed to transform the gesture of ‘The Temporary Hegemonic Zone’, into a non-hierarchical zone that is equally governable by itswhole community: from marginalized, undocumented,stateless communities to migrants and citizens.

DELEGATES

Mohamed Abdol Monem, Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Ahmed Adelian, Ashok Adicéam, Azra Akšamija,Lauren Alexander (foundland Collective), TaniBahtuali, Bilal Alkatout, Ammar Alkhatib, Jawad Al Malhi, Samer Arquawi, Kazem Ashourzadeh,Wali Askarzay, Mercedes Azpilicueta, ĐorđeBalmazović, Javier Barrios, Dorian Batycka, Seren Başoğul, Lutz Becker, Laura Beckner, Ilaria Biotti, Bianca Bondi, Candice Breitz,Oleksandr Burlaka, Nawal Chagar, Oliver Chanarin,Qëndresë Deda, Burak Dkilitaş, Claudio Donadel,Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani, Safia Dickersbach, Esra Dogan, Aljoša Dujmić, Goran Đorđević, Róza El-Hassan, Ghalia Elsrakbi (foundlandCollective), Mounir fatmi, Amir fattal, Michaelfehr, five women from Afghanistan as collective,Becket flannery, Jeanno Gaussi, Kendell Geers,Jingxin Geng, Laura Serejo Genes, Sarah Haddou, Anawana Haloba, Hamid, Hasan Hasan,Sharafuddin Hashami, Hands Off Our Revolution,Velija Hasanbegović, Winnie Herbstein, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, AgataKochaniewicz, Komunal, Don Lawrence, SarahLunaček, Dr Andrew Lane, Delaine Le Bas, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Laetitia Jeurissen, YoussefLimoud, Mahmoud Maktabi, Asja Mandić, SiavashMaraghechi, Mpole Samuel Masemola, SithabileMlotshwa, Sohrab Mohebbi, Wagma Momand,Victor Mutelekesha, Raafat Majzoub, Wafa Meri,Mohammed Mzaill, Ramen Naqshbandi, Izaat Noori,Olu Oguibe, Shafiq Omar, Reyhane Omidghaemi,Noorulah Oriakhil, Ahmet Öğüt, Danny Pagarani,Mario Pissara, Ognjen Radivojević, PaymanQuasimian, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, LotteSchreiber, Megan Schwartz, Sejernader, LeratoShadi, Shahin, Adnan Softić, Malina Suliman, Lama Takruri, Christina Thomopoulos, BarthélémyToguo, Leontios Toumpouris, Two women fromAfghanistan, Gerrie van Noord, Heidi Voet, Zahra,Vadim Zakharov, Salah Zater.

9

ahmet Ogut, preliminary sketches and ideasfor NSK State Pavilion, photomontages,courtesy the artist, 2016-2017


10

This pavilion’s edition and exhibitiontopic, proposed by Zdenka Badovinac andCharles Esche, resulted in a complex head-on commitment to the understanding ofcontemporary European migratory policies.As a civil and collateral activity to theexhibition project, a series of workshopstook place along over the course of oneyear with multidisciplinary groups of participants, with the aim of creating amodel of cooperation between the socialand cultural spheres. A specific methodo-logy was put in place to share experiences,and to propose and imagine new coopera-tive solutions of cooperation. Based on amodel of participation and horizontal sha-ring of resources, contacts, and knowledge,the five workshops were structured andimplemented on the basis of differentformats, reflecting on the issue of termi-nological borders that divide the world ofart and the world of politics, as well as onthe reciprocal understanding of issues rela-ted to socio-cultural engagement, humani-tarian protection, and a better understandingof migratory fluxes flows and traits.

They thereby involved, at the same time,three to four languages, and demandedsimultaneous translation and mediation soas to stimulate a quality debate betweenindividuals with diverse experiences, andto trigger their problem-solving capabilities.The groups involved had different cultural,ideological, economic, and generational(i.e. age) backgrounds; thus, the workshopsturned into a powerful methodologicaldevice, unleashing a collective effort drivenby the need to create an intervention thatgoes beyond representation.One of the biggest achievements andoutcomes of these workshops is ‘BeyondBorders’, a proposal for a transnationalreception model for humanitarian protec-tion applicants and sans papiers that was written and amended by DelegateClaudio Donadel.

More information is available at:www.nsk-state-pavilion.org.

NOTES ON METHODOLOGYAND STRUCTURE Of

SYMPOSIUMS / WORKSHOPS

Mara Ambrožič

Pavilion Team, ljubljana (Slovenia), courtesyNSK State Pavilion, august 2016

Pavilion Team, Teatrino di Palazzo grassi, venice (Italy), courtesy NSK State Pavilion, December 2016

workshop, aula Magna Tolentini, venice (Italy),courtesy NSK State Pavilion, December 2016

workshop, venice (Italy), courtesy NSK StatePavilion, february 2017

NSK State Pavilion Team with the workshop Participants, venice (Italy), courtesy NSK StatePavilion, february 2017


11

BEYONDBORDERSClaudio Donadel

Forced migrations and social inclusion,implementation of a transnationalnetwork to support a model of widespreadterritorial reception for applicants andholders of international and humanitarianprotection in EU countries.

The project proposal is triggered by aninitiative of the art world and, specifically,of IRWIN, a branch of the movement de-veloped in Slovenia during the dissolutionof former Yugoslavia, whose artists, throughtheir actions and practices, formed the“State without territory” and of ZdenkaBadovinac and Charles Esche, curators ofthe exhibition NSK State Pavilion – 57thVenice Biennale, who selected migrationas the exhibition topic.

The recent debate developed among suchmovements on the phenomenon of thecurrent forced migration towards EUcountries, is characterized by considera-tions of: its reasons, origin, issues relatedto border security, the management ofmixed migration flows and reception ofmigrants in EU countries, the protection ofrights and of vulnerable groups, as well asthe diversified strategies adopted by EUcountries pertaining to border security, re-ception of refugees and asylum seekers.This current scenario suggests that, in thecoming years, the issue of forced migra-tions could become a determining factor forboth the orientation of future public policiesof EU countries, as well as for the destinyand survival of the European Union itself.

To date, the apparent absence of sharedand uniform policies among EU countriesin managing and governing mixedmigration flows to Europe by land and by sea as well as the different territorialpolicies for the reception of refugees andasylum seekers, are factors of crisis anddivision among the governments of EUstates. In fact, they could be the possiblereasons for the strengthening of Europeannew nationalisms and populisms whichfight for the exit of individual states fromthe EU, and for those who demand theerection of walls as well as the restorationof internal borders in defense of theidentity and integrity of each nation.Brexit is the outcome of this scenario, as it has definitely found strength andideological support among Britishcitizens, both in the much propagandizedfear of non-EU immigration as well as inthe will to contain and regulate all thosemigration flows of EU citizens to the UK,in limiting the latter access to rights andsocial protection otherwise granted byBritish citizenship.

All these factors are the symptoms and causes of the deep crisis currentlyfaced by all doctrines and subsequentpolicies followed by European countries,especially where there is the need tojointly manage and govern complex and transnational social phenomena suchas the current mass migration to Europe.

These are increasingly related andsubordinated to market globalization thatconcentrates power and capital no longerin state and national institutions but insupranational economic organizations,which are profit-oriented and do notprotect human rights or the internationallyrecognized and so-called vulnerablecategories, such as the applicants andholders of International Protection,Unaccompanied foreign Minors andTrafficking Victims.

And it is within this scenario and debatethat operators active in the world ofcontemporary and modern art decided to support social workers with relevantexperience in managing receptionarrangements for applicants and holders of International Protection and Victims of Trafficking in their efforts to promoteand build a transnational network withinEU countries for the implementation of an innovative territorial receptionmodel for applicants and holders ofInternational Protection in shared ornuclear households, complementary towhat already operated by EU countries,and based on large or small shelters,whether widespread or not.

“Beyond Borders” is a reception modelthat, first of all, acts as a stimulus to theconstruction of an international protectioneffort within the EU, overcoming the cur-rent territorial differences in treatment andthe frequent incomplete implementationof reception and protection measures provided for in International Law for applicants and holders of InternationalProtection. To date these differentiationsare carriers of inequalities if not real discrimination depending on the countrywhere the migrant decides to come forward or initiate the request for International Protection. The project setsthe social inclusion of the applicant orholder of International Protection as astrategic and primary objective, instead of subordinate or dependent to that of the asylum request.

furthermore, “Beyond Borders” fightsthe welfare culture that transforms the migrant, regardless of their condition orform of granted protection, into a sourceof easy money for those working in thesocial sector or into a propaganda tool forthose politicians who have decided tobroaden their electoral support leveragingxenophobia and the costs of migrants atthe expense of resources and services forEU citizens. Instead, fosters an approachcentered on actively promoting the indi-vidual, so that the opportunities offered to migrants result in resources for theirbeneficiaries as well as for the local com-munities where they are accommodated.

The main objectives of this project aresocial, cultural and political as well asoperational and managerial, and could be summarized as follows:

1) Raising awareness among EUcitizens on the phenomenon of forcedmigration and on the vulnerablecategories involved in it through culturalevents or participation in internationalexhibitions with project proposalsdesigned, carried out and managed by artists together with migrant applicants or holders of International and Humanitarian Protection.

2) Designing and testing, in Italy, bya multi-professional team of lawyers,educators, cultural-linguistic mediators,psychologists with cross-cultural training,of a widespread territorial receptionmodel for applicants and holders ofInternational and Humanitarian Protectionin residential areas of EU citizens, incompliance with the safeguards, rules andmeasures provided for in InternationalLaw and by the guidelines of receptionand assistance in asylum application andsocial inclusion, such as: financialsupport; legal, medical, social andpsychological counseling; literacy andcivic and language training; professionaltraining, housing and job placement.

3) Setting up a system of evaluation andcertification of the widespread territorialreception model, namely the outcome ofthe processes of social inclusion in termsof safeguards as well as of opportunitiesoffered to the beneficiaries, and the impactand benefits for the local communities that have hosted them.

4) Transferring the model tested in Italy to three other European territories in orderto formalize it as Good Practice which can be implemented in any other contextwithin the EU, regardless of their status asterritories of access, transit or destinationof the current migration flows to Europe.

5) Disseminating the widespreadterritorial reception model in other EUcountries, promoting Good Practicethrough participation in international or national events and art exhibitions,following the procedures designed andtested in Italy and later formalized inAustria, Germany and Slovenia.

6) Countering any emerging xenophobicor populist discourse against applicantsand holders of International andHumanitarian Protection in the EU,setting up a transnational network of2,100 centers or host families, 75 in each EU country, so as to diversify and strengthen the existing nationalreception systems mainly based on shelter centers or camps.

7) Promoting the creation of an EUInternational Protection from the bottom up, from civil society to the EU institutions, to ensure that migrantsapplicants and holders of International and Humanitarian Protection can besupported by common and sharedreception policies, regardless of the country entitled to evaluate and eventually grant InternationalProtection status.

The “Beyond Borders” project, in its most extensive framework, iscomposed of 3 complex phases. It expects an initial experimental test of a "widespread territorial reception project on a local level” to be carried out in Italy (as Italy, for current migration to Europe, is at the same time country of entry, transit and destination of the CentralMediterranean route). It’s the phase ofrecognition and identification of thenecessary operational procedures toimplement a widespread territorialreception of migrants seeking or holdingInternational and Humanitarian Protectionin residential areas of Italian citizens.

A second stage will extend it to a macro-regional level, transferring the modeltested in Italy to 3 other local contextscharacterized by being transit anddestination territories of the migrationroutes to Europe via sea and land. The plan is to transfer the model toAustria, Germany and Slovenia. It’s the stage of formalization of the GoodPractice model and of its transferability to different local contexts, whether they be countries of arrival, transit or destination of the applicants andholders of International Protection.

The project includes a third and final phase, its transnationality: the strengthening of the network offamilies or of residential areas through the dissemination of the widespreadterritorial reception model in other EU territories. The implementation of the latter step will no longer besubjected to technical, operational andmanagement aspects of reception ofapplicants and holders of International and Humanitarian Protection in differentEuropean local contexts, but it willdepend on political will, or rather on the reception policy applied by thegovernments of the other EU countries,and on the capability of civil society andits intermediate bodies to direct it whileparticipating in its set-up. Therefore, thetransnational outreach of the widespreadterritorial reception model will depend on the capability and willingness of theintermediate bodies of civil society suchas the non-profit sector and the NGOsoperating in those other EU countries to strengthen and expand the receptionnetwork to the capacity foreseen by this project (75 reception units). It willespecially depend on their ability to make national and regional publicinstitutions more reactive and effective in including the widespread territorialreception model within their migrationand reception policies of the applicantsand holders of International andHumanitarian Protection.

“Beyond Borders” includes four artisticprojects; 1 connected to the experimentalphase in Italy and then 3 more, 1 in Austria,1 in Germany and 1 in Slovenia, aimedat raising awareness of the migrationphenomenon and the individuals involvedin it, and including systematic actions tofacilitate the implementation of territorialreception networks and to promote theprojects of widespread territorial reception.

The whole project is available at:www.nsk-state-pavilion.org.


12

NSK OffICERS

aBrahaM OhaMhEN — My nameis Abraham, I’m 27 years old. I come fromNigeria, where I no longer have neitherrelatives or friends, and I arrived in Italy two years ago, in 2015. for the lastfew months, I have been living with agroup of international protection seekersin fossalta, next to Portogruaro, in theprovince of Venice, with a project organ-ized by Co.Ge.S. I’m happy to haveparticipated in your selection and evenmore to have been chosen, because thiswork will allow me to take part in this international experience with you, meetmany people from all over the world andmake new friends, and also because I willbe able to share my story with others. At the moment I can’t speak much Italian,because I started classes only 3 monthsago, but I’m studying every day and I’msure that when I start working, I will bevery good at it! In my spare time, apartfrom studying Italian, I love to read, espe-cially history books, and to play football.I’ve done many jobs in my life, but theone I’m very good at is the crafting ofgates, windows, doors, stairs handrails,iron scaffoldings, which I create myself:from designing through iron welding tovarnishing. In the future, I would like tohave the opportunity to create a familywith children and, before that, to find a jobwhere I can put all my skills to good use.for this reason, I brought with me fromNigeria a series of pictures of my own creations. If you want, I can show yousome of my works that I always keep onmy cell phone. I hope to meet you againsoon and I’m sure that we will have a wonderful experience together.

aMarJOTPal Kaur — My nameis Amarjotpal Kaur and I come from Punjab, India. for three months and a half I have been living in Italy, in the cityof Padova. I was very happy when I waschosen to work with this project becauseI’m sure it will be a wonderful experienceand I am glad to be part of it. I very muchlike the idea of a state without borders,where everybody can enter and live inpeace with everybody else. During mydifficult journey to reach Italy I alwayshad the sensation of being perceived as a danger: I had to hide, I could not speakto anyone, and I had to run away from the police. I am not a dangerous person,but I have been treated as such at all border controls. I am now finally safe and I am grateful to the good people whogave me shelter. I am happy about this job because I’ve had a lot of free time recently and I need to do something, both for my body and for my mind. During the selection I noticed that all the people working in the Pavilion werevery nice and kind. I really hope they will be proud of my work and my nature.In the future, I hope to remain in Italy,find a job and keep living together withthe person I love.

charlES TawIah — My name isCharles Tawiah, although it is misspelledin my residency permit: they wrote itTewiah. I come from Ghana, I’m 19years old. I arrived in Italy not even ayear ago. I like the idea of participatingin the NSK State Pavilion because inthis period of my life I feel like a square,like Prato della Valle, the most beautifulsquare in Padova. I feel like a squarebecause that’s where people meet, where people gather, study, dance, play. I would like to be a person that allowspeople to meet and to stay and play together. Maybe even more than a“squareperson”, I would like to be a“bridgeperson”. I love to participate inthis experience because I want people to cross me in the same way as they pass a bridge. To go across my story,what I lived, the efforts, the time, theneverending journey, the prison, the hard labour. I want people to consider me for what I am: an artwork. Even if itis only because I got this far and havebeen through a lot. They issued me atwoyear residency permit. In this time,I’ve learned how to make pizza and Icook it in many different ways, withevery imaginable ingredient (plantain,beans, cabbage). I’ve painted black one of the walls in my house so that I now have a blackboard, and everyevening I review everything I learnedthat day: new recipes, how to drive aforklift, a new word in Italian, or howflowers taste, and that it is beautiful to spend time outside when it’s sunny. I would like to keep on learning. Andeverything I’ve been through may very well be a bridge, or a square, but not my home.

MErcy NwafOr — My name isMercy, I’m 25 years old, I come fromNigeria. I arrived in Italy at the end ofOctober 2016 and I live in Padova as a guest of a project for reception and integration of asylum seekers. I’m veryhappy to participate in the NSK StatePavilion, first of all because it will allowme to interact with many different peopleand, as I am very sociable, this is some-thing I am very excited about, but most ofall because of the idea that this Pavilionconveys: I am an asylum seeker and itwas very difficult for me to reach Italy. It was difficult and frightening to crossthe borders of African countries in orderto reach Libya; and the journey by seafrom Libya to Italy was just as hard. I cansay that I’ve risked my own life severaltimes to reach Europe and save myselffrom the dangerous situation in my homecountry, so I think that it’s very importantto conceive citizenship in an altogetherdifferent way, one that allows people who are in danger to travel to safety in an easier and safer way. Now that I’vecome so far, my biggest desire is to obtain international protection so that I can build a life in Italy. I like Italy very much, this is my destination andI’ve never thought to move elsewhere.I’m working hard to learn Italian and as soon as I speak it well enough, I wantto find a job that allows me to pay therent and the bills.


What do you want to take with you fromEuropean heritage (as you understand it)to help build a new and better world?

I would like to take with me the possi-bility of legal amnesty for artists, intellec-tuals, and all the human rights advocatesand their families.

In spite of the topic “An Apology forModernity”, I would like to bring with me,into the future, formal Modernism andthe security of the individual. Modernism,to me, means the permission to think,imagine and combine, as well as the per-mission to be fair and autonomous. Allthese ideas are well expressed in artworksby Kazimir Malevič, and many other artistslike Sonia Delaunay, one of my favorites.The message of this image could be thelack of restriction of thinking patterns and,by this, the freedom and maybe also thelegal security of the individual.

The opposite of freedom of thought istyranny, which comes with arbitrary decisions and restrictions to think. All thisdoes not mean that rationality, enlighten-ment and modernity are the only levels ofintellectual or mental reality. It means thatthe lack of restriction to think is the onlysocial basis of the well-being – in terms oflegal protection – both for the individualand the human beings.

This type of well-being is not only aboutthe legal security of the individual, but itis something broader: the right to liberty ofmovement, the freedom of thought andexpression, the health of the individual, hissecurity to posses all his – or her – organs(the kidneys and the uterus, as well as hisor her imagination) and the right to a basicincome that would cover his primary needs(food, water, heating, education, transport).

What do you want to forget or delete fromEuropean heritage (as you understand it)to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

World Wars, the tyranny of state socialism,and the Holocaust, the darkest side of history.

What do you want to take with you fromthe heritage of your own country (as youunderstand it) to help build a new andbetter world?

Since I have two countries in my back-ground, I would like to take the historicalexperience of reconciliation – as it happenedin the 19th century in the Habsburg Empireand in Hungary after the 1848 Revolution– to other countries. Even if the HungarianRevolution was lost, it was followed bymany discussions and reforms within theexisting power and, after years of patientnegotiations, the region was able to flourish.I always wish that something similar couldhappen in Syria and in other countries.

I ask governments for amnesty for all intellectuals and human rights activistswho left their countries, who were forcedto spend their lives migrating or being silenced as inner dissidents, detained inprisons or in mental hospitals, isolated bypoverty and unemployment, due to the re-strictions on working. I ask all the govern-ments for amnesty for all freethinkers.

What do you want to forget or delete fromthe heritage of your own country (as youunderstand it) to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past?

I would like to delete the moment whenbooks and documents were burned. By thisI mean the despotic control of publicationsin the broadest form. Burning data meansburning witnesses and eyewitnesses.Burning books means burning freedomof thought. Destroying documents meansdestroying any possibility of justice.

further, I ask not to chase and detainintellectuals, artists and human rightsadvocates. I ask a broad amnesty for authors and public voices. In exchange, I offer to stop chanting: «People want the fall of the regime». I will stop all thisbut, in exchange, I ask for full amnestyand for elections.

further, I would like to add one morequestion to the NSK Questionnaire:

Whom shall we ask for amnesty?

Whom should we address this questionto? At first, the answer seems to be quiteobvious: to the President of the State, tothe Ruler (a King or a Sheikh, dependingon the case) or to the Government. But it’snot that simple. Let’s take Lebanon, forinstance. About 4 million Lebanese peoplelive there (Wikipedia), while about fivetimes more Lebanese people live abroad(8-14 million); the biggest community isin Brazil (7 millions) but many are alsoliving in Canada or in Europe. Despitethis, Lebanon has 6 million inhabitants –and not 4 – because one in every fiveLebanese inhabitants is from Syria, mostof the others are Palestinians and a fewother nationalities. We could also listnumbers of Syrians or Iraqis abroad.

The protection – both mental and legal– of our lives is mainly provided by ourfamily and friends (and seldom by thewelfare state, as in Sweden or Norway).The families from regions like the MiddleEast are torn apart; some of them live indemocratic societies, others don’t. Thosewho live as migrants outside the Syrian war regions – in Europe, Brazil or in the Arabian-Persian Gulf – are not safe at all:since they are migrating without theproper citizen rights, they are possible victims of human rights violation. Thismay seems quite obvious, but it is not theonly problem: even after receiving a EUcitizenship or permanent residency, thesepeople do not have the same safe and convenient legal situation as a native Eu-ropean citizen. This happens becausesome illegitimate powers outside thewelfare state can put pressure on them,and also because their political voice, theirimproved legal situation and the strengthof their network is still responsible for the fate of their relatives, who live in warregions without any legal protection.Imagine this kind of situation: you live in Europe, but a relative of yours is in aprison where hundreds, thousands of people are killed and many of them aretortured. Or in a village, or district of acity, which might be targeted at any time.

Do you still feel protected by your EUpassport? Or are you mentally connectedto those communities, friends, families,children who are shelled at home? Don’tyou live in permanent desperation andfear? How much money do you have topay so that the international criminals protect these human beings, at home?

So my question is: whom shall we askfor amnesty and peace? Which Govern-ment? The President of Europe or the war-torn homelands? Shall we ask the localpolice of our district for amnesty? In thiscase, this means mercy and compassion:shall we ask them not to find and arrestus, if accusations are false? Or shall weask the Court? Or the Ministry of InnerAffairs? Or the Ministry of foreign Affairs? Shall we ask a rich relative? An uncle, a father, a boss, a godfather or a guardian angel? Could it happen thatwe end up victims of human traffickingalthough we have EU citizenship?

Or shall we ask the media – news,radio and the internet – to ask it for us?And what about the newspapers? And thefree press? The best is to ask the press tosupport amnesty for human rights advo-cates and simple people. But, in this case,who will protect the journalists frombeing killed in the war regions? Or fromlosing their jobs and sponsors at home ifthey dig too deep into the power struc-ture’s status quo? Of course, the free pressand the media play a really important role.The power of the public is expressedthrough the elections and maybe evenmore by the public opinion. The free press plays the role to inform peopleabout the social reality and all that theycannot witness.

In 1956, the Revolutionary Youth didn’tstorm the Parliament first of all, but Hungarian Radio. It took the microphoneof that media channel – the only one at thattime – and announced the system change.Today there are hundreds and thousandsof media channel to influence the publicopinion. It is hard to imagine, that in thattime there was no daily TV broadcast, nointernet etc… Hungarian Radio was ThePublic Voice. One voice. The mainstream.In that moment, to storm the radio build-ing and to grab the microphone meant to take over the power in the country. We used to criticize the mainstreammedia; today we no longer have one waybroadcast TV and radio, but the web. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze andGuattari compare today’s informationchannel to the rhizome, a dense web of information channels, which is differentfrom the earlier pyramid structure.

(I do disagree with them on this point,because I believe that there are privilegedpoints in the system, which have a higherposition in the hierarchy, and there are alsopyramids above the rhizome-spider-web.)

The question arises: which microphonecan we grab today to ask for a systemchange, for reforms, for amnesty or to in-form the public and to ask for their supportin case of injustice or, not least, to protect thepeople? Shall we ask the social platforms?If it comes to a trial, most of the evidencefor – or against – an accusation against asubject is delivered on the so-called digitalsocial media, internet. It is not printed onpaper, or stored as analogue film anymore.It is stored on the servers. The system ad-ministrator has access to the data; this meansthat he has the power to make changes.Servers are not national, but global or pri-vate. Shall we ask the system admins forour amnesty? They often have the key role.But where are the? In Ireland where you canfind big servers? Or in California? If there isa crime on facebook and the involved victimlives in Hungary, it happens that Californianlaws are valid, as long as it happened on thevirtual territory of facebook.

Or shall we ask our friends and family,our personal network, to help us with in-formal support? A father, an uncle, a boss?An informal network, friends. Startingfrom the bottom of the power pyramid?Step by step? What about those, whosenetwork is not influential enough andnever reaches the President, the Court orthe Police? The list of questions is end-less. The legal system is divided into leg-islative, juristic and executive power inorder to protect the individual and to notcentralize the power. The executive forceis local: think about the policeman, withthe lowest salary in the chain, who has toarrest you. He follows an order. Or thedoctor who has to treat you, if you’re de-clared mentally ill. Who decides, locally,if you will be treated for mental illnesscaused by the trauma of war with coun-selling and soft natural therapies likesports, yoga, music and herbs, or if youwill be just tied down to a bed with plas-tic, detained in a dirty clinic behind barsand injected with unknown brain serumsthat you would not want? Executivepower may also be the postman, whobrings you an important letter or docu-ment, and who decides – following anorder or being corrupted – if you shouldreceive the necessary documents that al-lows you to legally stay in a country, or if

13

Sonia Delaunay and two friends in robert Delaunay’sstudio, rue des grands-augustins, Paris (1924) ©Bibliothèque nationale de france, Paris


WHOM SHALL WE ASKfOR AMNESTY?

Róza El-Hassan

14

THE fINAL COUNTDOWN:EUROPE,

REfUGEES AND THE LEfT

Jela Krečič

There is a commonly accepted notion on the political Leftthat Europe's response to hundreds of thousands of refugeeswas and is unacceptable. While the Left is mostly concernedwith the rise of right-wing populism, which is gaining itspower from the supposed threat of the immigrants, its ownhumanitarian and philanthropic approach towards Europe’snewcomers is no less inadequate.

Eleven texts by radical Leftist thinkers try to disentanglethis mess; they provide a sharp analysis of today’s geopo-litical situation with emphasis on political developments inEurope and on the shift in the global ideological frame.

This shift is traced back to several historical events,most importantly to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the predom-inance of neoliberal capitalism, and also the incapacityof the political Left to respond to post-Cold-War politicalantagonisms. The volume ruthlessly debunks many of theflagship ideas of the liberal Left, such as identity politics,post-colonialism, and political correctness.

Although different thinkers take different approaches,the result is a common insight that a different kind ofLeftist struggle is needed, one that does not overlook thecentral role of classical concepts, such as struggle, andthe importance of creating a universalist political framefor dealing with major problems.

IrwIN The IRWIN group was founded in Ljubljana(Slovenia) in 1983. Its members are DusanMandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, RomanUranjek and Borut Vogelnik. With theirartistic practice they actively and concretelyintervened in social and historical activitiesin the decade that redefined the status of art in Eastern Europe (Kapital, NSK EmbassyMoscow, Transnacionala, East Art Mapprojects). Recent exhibitions and projectsinclude: NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst),From Kapital to Capital, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in 2017 and Van Abbemuseum,Eindhoven and Garage Museum of Contem-porary Art, Moscow in 2016; IRWIN PlantingSeeds, Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art,Gdansk, Poland, 2016; NSK (Neue SlowenischeKunst), From Kapital to Capital, Modernagalerija, Ljubljana, 2015; Dreams and Conflicts, Galleria Civica di Modena, Modena, 2014; Former West, HKW, Berlin,2013; A Bigger Splash, Tate Modern, London,2012–13; NSK Passport Office, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 2012; Manifesta,Genk, 2012; The Global Contemporary. The Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2011; The International, MACBA, 2011; State in Time,Kunsthalle Krems, 2009; NSK Passport Holders, Taipei Biennial, Taipei ArtMuseum, 2008; Birds of a Feather, Akbank Art Center, Istanbul, 2006–07.

ZDENKa BaDOvINac Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer,who has served since 1993 as Director of theModerna galerija in Ljubljana, comprisedsince 2011 of two locations: the Museum ofModern Art and the Museum of Contempo-rary Art Metelkova. In her work, Badovinachighlights the difficult processes of redefin-ing history alongside different avant-gardetraditions within contemporary art. Badov-inac’s first exhibition to address these issueswas Body and the East—From the 1960s tothe Present (1998). She also initiated thefirst Eastern European art collection, 2000+Arteast. One her most important recent projects is NSK from Kapital to Capital:Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Modernagalerija, 2015. Badovinac was SlovenianCommissioner at the Venice Biennale from1993 to 1997 and 2005, Austrian Commis-sioner at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2002 and the President of CIMAM, 2010-13.

charlES ESchECharles Esche is director of Van Abbemuseum,Eindhoven; professor of contemporary art andcurating at Central Saint Martins, London andco-director of Afterall Journal and Books. He teaches on the Exhibition StudiesMRescourse at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie,Maastricht. He (co) curated Jakarta Biennale2015; 31st Sao Paulo Biennial, 2014; U3 Triennale, Ljubljana, 2011; Istanbul Biennale,2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002 amongst otherinternational exhibitions. He is chair ofCASCO, Utrecht. He received the 2012Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCSBard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

ahMET ÖğüTÖğüt, born in 1981 in Diyarbakır (Turkey), is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. Working across a variety of media, Öğüt has had institutional solo exhi-bitions around the world including SALT ArtSpace, Istanbul (2016); Van Abbemuseum,Eindhoven (2015); Chisenhale Gallery, London(2015); Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2012); TheMATRIx Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum (2010); and Kunsthalle Basel (2008).He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 11th Gwangju Biennale(2016); the British Art Show 8 (2015–2017);Museum On/OFF, Centre Pompidou, Paris(2016); 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale(2014); Performa 13, the fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); and the 5thBerlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008).Öğüt has completed several residency pro-grams, including programs at the Delfinafoundation and Tate Modern (2012); IASPIS,Sweden (2011); and Rijksakademie vanBeeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2007–2008).He has taught at the Dutch Art Institute,Netherlands (2012); the finnish Academy offine Arts, finland (2011–ongoing); and YildizTeknik University, Turkey (2004–2006). He iscurrently working on a duo exhibition withGoshka Macuga at Witte de With Center forContemporary Art and his upcoming solo showsat KOW gallery in Berlin and KunsthalleCharlottenburg in Copenhagen (2017).

Mara aMBrOžIČ Mara Ambrožič is an expert in strategiesof cooperation, a curator, and cultural critic. She holds an MA in Visual Studiesfrom IUAV University of Venice, where she studied with Giorgio Agamben,Angela Vettese, franco Bifo Berardi.

She currently holds a PhD research positionin international cooperation, curating and newinstitutional policies at the LJMU Universityof Liverpool. She has lectured on art theoryand the culture industry as fellow professoralongside Marta Kuzma, and served as a visi-ting lecturer at the Sciences Po University inParis. Ambrožič has participated in the deve-lopment of several international organisationsand networks, as well as working as a consul-tant for the Ministère de la Communicationde Paris. She has published texts and editedseveral books and has also acted as a curatorfor various projects, such as Slovene Pavi-lion: Tobias Putrih, 52nd Venice Biennale in2007, States of Opacity: 12thEdition of theDakar Biennale in 2015.In 2016 she initiated the model Libraries ofthe Future at the Centre Pompidou (Paris).

SlavOJ žIžEK Slavoj Žižek is a Christian atheist, Hegelianphilosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Communist political theorist. His work tries to refound dialectical materialism through a Lacanian reading of German Idealism. He also deals with the critical diagnostics of con-temporary capitalism and of the twists and turns of today's ideology. He works as a Re-searcher at Birkbeck College, University ofLondon; Visiting Professor at NYU, NewYork City, and at Kyung Hee University, Seoul.Among his latest publications: Disparities(London, 2016), Antigone (London, 2016), The Courage of Hopelessness (London, 2017).

JEla KrEČIČ Jela Krečič is a philosopher, journalist andwriter. In 2008 she obtained a PhD at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, with her research project Philosophy,Fantasy, Film. In her theoretical work shedeals with philosophy of art, contemporary artand film theory. She has co-edited books oncontemporary TV-series and on film directorErnst Lubitsch. film comedy with its politicaland ethical dimensions is one of the recurringthemes of her analysis. In 2012, she gave alecture titled Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre:The Theatre of the Living Concept during theinternational symposium “Neue SlowenischeKunst: A Historical Perspective”, which tookplace at the Tate Modern (London). As a jour-nalist she covers mainly cultural themes fromliterature, contemporary art to film and televi-sion, but is best known for her interview withJulian Assange. Last year she published herfirst novel None Like Her.

the documents from the Court or the police administration– such as letters, passports and bank cards – will everreach your mailbox. It gets even more complicated withyour phone and net communications. Is it executivepower, which allows you to talk to anybody locally? Is itthe big T-Com building around the corner? Or is it ahacker? Or many hackers? What happens, if all your com-munication channels are cut off, all your passwords stolenand you are no longer in control of what you write, say,send, delete or which calls you make and which you re-ceive? The executive power can also be your boss, whopays you, or even a family member, who is forced to ac-cuse you, since he can be blackmailed by financial tools oreven by dislocated military authorities. Or a family, who isforced to sell a young girl to an elder man or to arrange amarriage with someone who holds a EU passport – nomatter if, between the two of them, there is love or not.There is a moral obligation to help. I did not mention thosefathers, who are forced to sell their organs – mainly kid-neys – because otherwise they could not support their fam-ilies. All these things happen locally; they are local. If youare politically accused or chased, endangered in yourhome country or in the country where you have a perma-nent residency, you can escape immediate executive pun-ishment: poverty by prohibition of salary payment, prison,shelling, death. You are forced to change country by be-coming an asylum seeker. But your escape might be lim-ited in time, since legal and legislative powers are notreally local – and thus related to a specific country – but,often, they are global. The juristic examples are muchmore complex: in their natural state, in fact, they are basi-cally local: the court and the judges are appointed by yournation/state. The laws and the latest rules are files kept indigital clouds and servers; this means that – physically –laws and regulations can be stored and edited everywhere:in Antarctica, on a satellite, or in another country. Regula-tions are no longer printed and permanent:lawyers sub-scribe to updates, just like software. Justice is a software.

The globalization of the legal system and the suprana-tional courts are, of course, nothing new: the United Na-tions is a supranational organization and all the empiresand colonial states have globalized systems. What haschanged is the intensity of the interconnections, as well astheir omnipresence and their speed. Legislative situationsare the most complex and dynamic. Legislators are thosewho make the rules. The voters – who should delegate thepoliticians – are often lost, migrated, in exile and state-less, without a possibility to vote. The elite often sit in aprivate plane; influence exists here and there.

The state without nation might become a place wherepeople only live as independent from their national iden-tity and their legal status (citizenship). This would be theend of all justice. We need to protect the unity of citizen-ship and the nation state or, to be precise, the state whereall citizens have the same legal status (no paperless peo-ple, no apartheid…); the nation state must not mean eth-nic homogeneity, even if a common language would bemore than useful. Some politicians suggest – and build –fences because of this. Still, there is no democracy orhuman rights protection in any country – including theEuropean ones – if someone does not care about humanrights and stable legal systems, if there is no protectionfor the citizens and if there is no peace outside the tradi-tional welfare state. This is what I wanted to show withmy question: «Whom shall I ask for amnesty?» This is apossible question to the reader and to NSK, IRWIN,Slavoj Žižek and Zdenka Badovinac, whose writings I re-spect and like very much and to whom I am thankful forthe initiative and for the invitation.

I would like to ask the reader to support amnesty inthe name of the many Syrians and people from war re-gions, and from all countries in the Middle East, but alsoin Europe and in my country, Hungary.Amnesty for allpeople who are chased and live in fear, for those who arehuman rights advocates and for those who just happenedto be in the wrong place or are witnesses of crimes. Often,when we happen to be in such situations, we have noexact person, or institute, whom we can address.

And now I ask the Delegates: «Do you need amnesty?»Only now, at the end of this text, I realize that my

question might have been completely wrong. We do notneed amnesty. We need states and a global system wherewe can live without fear, places where masses – who arenot guilty – do not need to ask for any amnesty.

Edited and introduced by Jela Krečič.

Contributors: Boris Buden, Mladen Dolar, Saroj Giri, Boris Groys, Agon Hamza, Jamil Khader, Robert Pfaller, frank Ruda, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič.


15

NSK STATE VENICE PAVILION

IN VIENNA – THINKING EUROPE

As a parallel project to the NSK State Pavilion in Venice,NSK State in Time will be opening a pavilion in Vienna,during Wiener festwochen. The NSK State Venice Pavilionin Vienna – Thinking Europe, curated by Birgit Lurz andWolfgang Schlag, will present the installation Europa byRamesch Daha and Anna Jermolaewa and a temporaryNSK passport office. As the NSK State Pavilion in Venice, the pavilion spacein Vienna includes two parts. The first part ‘An Apo-logy’, written on behalf of the liberal western world torefugees, as well as to those who were unable to chosenot to flee, was developed together with scientific con-sultant Tomaž Mastnak. The second part, a room of ‘global disorder’, presentsthe responses of around 100 different citizens, migrantsand stateless individuals to questions about Europeanand personal heritage. These responses shape the contentof the installation Europa in the second space.Inside the pavilion is a temporary NSK passport office.Together with the Viennese NGO Einander, asylum seekersrun the passport office and guide visitors and potentialnew citizens through the exhibition and talk about theirexperience of migration and their life in Austria. The officewill issue NSK passports to all applicants who apply andare willing to engage in a dialogue.

Europa – An Open Archive of Stories

for the NSK State Venice Pavilion in Vienna – ThinkingEurope the artists Ramesch Daha and Anna Jermolaewahave created the installation Europa, based on the results of 100 questionnaires.Individuals, who came to Austria from non-europeancountries for different reasons, were asked to answer general and personal questions about their individual perspectives on Europe, such as: What does homelandmean for you?, What does Europe mean for you?, What should a future Europe look like?.

Based on the results of the question What is your favoriteartwork? the artists set up an ‘imaginary museum’ ofpaintings like a checkpoint between the Egypt and Palestinian border, a Heavy Metal lyric, The Kiss by Gustav Klimt or the Eiffel Tower. from this archive of answers emerges an image that is at once universal and extremely personal. Instead of merging the answers with conventional narrative forms,the installation opens up a variety of connections and histories. It is a critical commentary on ‘European Heritage’, and, at the same time, raises questions about the continent’s future. The installation is an open archive of experiences, ideas, and hopes.

Ramesch Daha, born 1971 in Teheran, Iran. Comprehensive historial research is characteristic inRamesch Daha’s artistic method which proceeds withan awareness of the constructed nature of history and of the subjectivity of the historical narrative. In her preferred artistic media painting, drawing, video, and installation she confronts the viewer with the discrepancy between individual and institutionalizedhistory in order to question the complexity of the present, the essence of which becomes apparentthrough her historical digressions. Ramesch Daha lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Anna Jermolaewa, born 1970 in St. Petersburg, Russia.Anna Jermolaewa analyzes stereotypical roles in regu-latory hierarchies and totalitarian power apparatuses.Her installations, photographs and videos reveal powerand control mechanisms in political systems, showinghow they result in shared collective and individualways of experiencing the world. The found and stagedimages are the distillate of a critical analysis of society,which, developed in short consecutive sequences,stands for the dependencies and forms of repression ofthe individual. Anna Jermolaewa lives and works inVienna, Austria.

anna Jermolaewa, Vincent Van Gogh,Selbstbildnis mit verbundenem Ohr / Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear,oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, 2017


ramesch Daha, Checkpoint, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 cm, 2017

ramesch Daha, Eiffelturm / Eiffel Tower,oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm, 2017

16

MAP

NSK STaTE PavIlION11 May – 15 July 2017(Opening Thursday, 11 May, at 8pm)

PalaZZO ca’ TrON Iuav university of veniceSanta croce, 1957

Nearest vaporetto: San Stae(vaporetto line 1)

free admissionMonday – Saturday: 11am – 7pm(closed on Sundays, and on 2 June 2017)

PuBlIc lEcTurE By SlavOJ žIžEKThursday, 11 May 2017 at 5pm

aula MagNa, TolentiniIuav university of veniceSanta croce, 191

Nearest vaporetto: Piazzale roma(vaporetto line 1 and many others)

how to get there information is available on the website.

NSK STaTE PavIlION — 57Th vENIcE BIENNalE2017

Exhibition: Palazzo Ca’ Tron, IUAVUniversity of Venice, 11 May – 15 July 2017

Inaugural lecture by Slavoj Žižek, 11 May 2017,Aula Magna Tolentini

Commissioners: IRWIN (Dušan Mandič,Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski,Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik)

Curators: Zdenka Badovinac, Charles Esche

Project Director: Mara Ambrožič

Installation: Ahmet Öğüt

Scientific Consultant: Tomaž Mastnak

General Coordination:Sanja Kuveljić Bandić

Managing Editors:Lucia Coco, Cédric fauq

Book Editor: Jela Krečič

Artistic Team: Chiara Gaspardo, Andrej Škufca

Graphic Identity: Archive Books and New Collectivism

State Art field Research:Tevž Logar

Web Developers: Roberto Moro, Jurij Rejec

Web Master: Tomaž Lešnjak

The Pavilion is commissionedand produced by IRWIN, co-produced by the Museumand Galleries of Ljubljanaand co-organised by TempleProductions and DruštvoNSK informativni center.

Project partners are Galerija Gregor Podnar,Berlin; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia; Wiener festwochen GesmbH,Vienna; Municipality of Ljubljana – Cultural Depar-tment; IUAV University ofVenice; e-flux, New York;James Gallery/The Center for the Humanities, NYU,New York; Co.Ge.S. – Cooperative for immigrationpolicies, Mestre; NSK StateReserve, New York.

The project was also madepossible by the generoussupport of RPS d.o.o.,Ljubljana; KD Group d.d.; VO-KA, Ljubljana; Stratkom d.o.o., Ljubljana;UBT University, Prishtina;OCA Office for ContemporaryArt, Oslo, Norway; Pavilionof Republic of Kiribati.

Press Agency: Rees & Company, LondonChloe [email protected]+44 (0)7742 239 178 +44 (0)20 3137 8776

NSK STaTE vENIcEPavIlION IN vIENNa –ThINKINg EurOPE

ARCC.art Open Space, 16 May – 11 June 2017

Public lecture: Slavoj Žižek, 20 May 2017, 6.30 pmwww.festwochen.at

Curators: Birgit Lurz, Wolfgang Schlag

Based on the project NSK State Pavilion — 57th Venice Biennale 2017commissioned by IRWIN, curated by Charles Esche and Zdenka Badovinac

Installation: Ramesch Daha, Anna Jermolaewa

Managerial Consultancy:Mara Ambrožič

Producer Vienna: Wiener festwochen

Producer: IRWIN

Co-producer: MGML – The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana

Project partners Vienna: AK Wien, ARCC.art, Verein Einander

With support of: AK Wien, Bundeskanzleramt Kunst und Kultur, SlowenischesKulturinformationszentrumin Österreich SKICA.

NEwSPaPEr

Editor: Mara Ambrožič

Managing Editor: Lucia Coco

Copy Editing: Miha Šuštar, Jane Warrilow

Graphic Design: Archive Appendix

Print run: 10.000 copies

Published by IRWIN

Printed in Ljubljana, 2017

ARSENALE

GIARDINI

TOLENTINI

ACCADEMIA

SAN MARCO

FONDAZIONEPRADA

PALAZZOCA’ TRON

VAPORETTOSAN STAE

RIALTO

STAZIONEFERROVIARIA

P.LE ROMA


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