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IRWIN NSK Embassy Moscow (1992) Report on Transnacionala, a Journey from East to West (1996) NSK Passport Holders, Filmed by Iwrin in Vienna from Dec. 12-13 (2007) NSK Passport Holders, London (2007) The IRWIN group was founded in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Its members are Dusan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik. IRWIN, along with the music group "Laibach" (1980), the performance group "Gledalisce Sester Scipion Nasice" (1983), later known as the "Kozmokineticni Kabinet Noordung", and the design department "Novi Kolektivizem", comprises one of the core groups within the artists' collective "Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)", established in 1984 in the Slovenian republic of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. IRWIN is committed to the so-called 'retro-principle' which is "not a style or an art trend but a principle of thought, a way of behaving and acting"(IRWIN). In its artistic projects the group IRWIN has been involving itself extensively with the art history of Europe, in particular with the ambivalent inheritance of the historical avant-gardes and its totalitarian successors, and thus with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. Following the creation of a specific visual language in their predominantly painterly projects of the 1980s, the group has been concentrating since the 1990s on a critical examination of the art history of "Western Modernism", countering it with the "retro-avant-garde" of a fictive "Eastern Modernism" which, in its own obvious artificiality, points to the artificiality of Western art historical structures that continue to exclude contemporary Eastern European art to this day. With their artistic practice they had actively and concretely intervened in social and historical activities in the decade that redefined the status of art in Eastern Europe (Kapital, NSK Embassy Moscow, Transnacionala, East Art Map projects).