21. 2. 2013 Artist talk

Artist talk with Vadim Fishkin and Miran Mohar (Irwin)
Slavija No 11, Ulica Vita Kraigherja, Maribor
Thursday, 21 February 2013 at 18:00
participating: Vadim Fishkin, Miran Mohar (Irwin) and Simona Vidmar

Vadim Fishkin and Irwin group are among the most exciting contemporary artists in Slovenia. By intervening in political and technological area they open questions about meaning of the art today. Vadim Fishkin and Miran Mohar will talk about their work and the work of the Irwin.

Miran Mohar (1958, Novo mesto) works as visual artist, graphic designer and scenographer. He is a member of Irwin group and cofounder of the artists' collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), established in 1984. Irwin is committed to the retro-principle and has been involved 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).

Vadim Fiškin (1965, Penza, ZSSR) graduated in 1986 from Moscow Institute of Architecture (Faculty of industrial architecture) and lived in Moscow until 1996. Now he lives and works in Ljubljana. His research, focused on relations between science, desires and imagination, relations between metaphysics and pragmatism, artificial and real, opens subtle connections, that stimulate curiosity without giving the final answer about the meaning. Numerous works by him, concerning geography, time, light, aeronautics and meteorology are full of his typical humour. He participated at numerous exhibitions worldwide, e. g. La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (1995, 2003, 2005), 1st Biennial in Valencia, Manifesta 1 in Rotterdamm, 3rd Istanbul Biennial, Secession in Vienna, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, Contemporary Art Center in Moscow, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Drawing Center in New York etc.

FREE ENTRY! YOU ARE KINDLY INVITED!