Without any doubt, Laibach is the most successful and longest-lasting artistic project to have emerged from the territory of former Yugoslavia. They were among the first to insist on the anonymity of collective work, that is, on functional organizational identities (Eber-Keller-Dachauer-Salliger) that transcend the civic identities of individual members. By opposing the conventional understanding of artistic work marked by individual authorship and the idea of the autonomy of art – placing nominally anonymous, non-individualized, collective creativity at the forefront – they negate the institutional hierarchies and power structures of the traditional museum-gallery art system. Symbolically, through the NSK State in Time, they outlived the collapse of the initial context of the state of their emergence, federal Yugoslavia, and transcended national borders. They successfully avoided both reduction to the cliché of dissident – anti-communist – artists and attempts at new national appropriation.
Laibach, The Death of Ideology, poster, 1982
They have held concerts in a number of countries, including one in North Korea; composed music for films and theatre productions; reworked Bach (Kunstderfuge, 2008) and Wagner (the Volkswagner concerts, 2009, unpublished); North Korean songs and the soundtrack of the film The Sound of Music (2018); held numerous exhibitions; and in their fifth decade of activity are releasing some of their strongest and most complex works (Alamut, 2025). Through projects such as the box set Revisited (2020), the musical re-enactment of the historic concert at the Zagreb Music Biennale in 1983 under the title We Forge the Future – Live at Reina Sofía (2021), the albums Sketches of the Red Districts (2023) and Opus Dei Revisited (2024), as well as the reinterpretation of the song “Top” by Bijelo dugme – “Die Kannone” – and the performance entitled The Fourth Session of AVNOJ at the Avnoj Fest at the AVNOJ Museum (Jajce, 29 November 2025), they themselves have returned to, re-examined, and referenced their own work from the 1980s and 1990s.
Austellung Laibach Kunst, invitation, Gallery PM, Zagreb, 1983
In the narrative surrounding Laibach, urban legends, media myths, and press accounts – as well as their own mystifications – constantly intertwine with unquestionable truths, factual data, and black holes in knowledge, precisely because this has been one of the fundamental modes of their operation from the very beginning. By its scope, this exhibition does not aspire to be an exhaustive retrospective of that vast body of work. Through archival materials, visuals, music, and multimedia – combining original artifacts, documentary materials, and reproductions – the exhibition Laibach: Hall of Mirrors 1980–1995 addresses the first fifteen years of activity of the multimedia collective Laibach, exploring and examining the complex relationships between art and politics, ideology and the media industry in their work, from their very beginnings in socialist Yugoslavia to their international breakthrough; through changes in both local and international contexts, and the overcoming of conceptual challenges posed to their practice by the dissolution of the SFRY and the wars of the 1990s.
The 12th Music Biennale Zagreb, 1983
The first iteration of this exhibition, somewhat different in its layout and exhibition context, entitled Power, Provocation, Deconstruction – LAIBACH 1980 – 1995, was presented at the Red History Museum in Dubrovnik from 22 March to 15 June 2025, at a moment when Laibach, through a major tour, were promoting the reissue of their pivotal album Opus Dei (1987). With this album, on their home ground they had established principles and mechanisms of work that were then transposed into the “countries of Western democracy” through a critique of market totalitarianism via a critique of the pop industry – that is, by exposing pop culture as an industrial and ideological mechanism (Opus Dei, Sympathy for the Devil, Let It Be…).
NSK passports
When we say that the exhibition addresses Laibach’s activity during those “heroic 1980s,” we are in fact referring to the “long 1980s”: a period that begins somewhat earlier, with punk and new wave, and ends somewhat later than the chronological 1980s – in this case with the signing of the Dayton Agreement and the end of the siege of Sarajevo (which lasted 44 months, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996). This is, therefore, what may be termed the “Yugoslav” period of their activity; in a certain sense, the exhibition covers the period between two deaths: between the physical death of Josip Broz Tito and the symbolic death of his revolutionary project of modernist, self-managed, and non-aligned Socialist Yugoslavia; the independence of the national states, the bloody war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the military intervention of the NATO alliance. That is, from the founding of Laibach Kunst in the mining town of Trbovlje on 1 June 1980, through their rise on both the domestic and international scenes, the media scandals and moral panic that accompanied their work, to the moment when, in 1995, in still-besieged Sarajevo, as part of their Occupied Europe NATO tour (promoting the album NATO), together with the collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, the NSK State Sarajevo was symbolically proclaimed at the National Theatre and two concerts were held – the second on 21 November 1995, precisely on the day the General Framework Agreement for Peace was signed in Dayton.
Nova Akropola, album cover, 1985.
This period of Laibach’s “long 1980s” can also be conceptualized through three sequences of their activity, which should not be understood as “stylistic formations,” formal changes of style or concept, but rather as reorganizations in response to broader shifts in the contexts of production and reception. The initial phase of Laibach Kunst encompasses the period from its founding in 1980 to 1984, within the framework of the alternative cultural scene, and is marked by a series of well-known media scandals, such as the one surrounding their performance at the Zagreb Music Biennale (1983).
Ljubljana, Zagreb, Beograd, poster, 1987
The second phase is defined by activity within the collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (1984–1991), an artistic project which, alongside Laibach, includes the theatre group Gledališče sester Scipiona Nasice and the visual arts group Irwin. This sequence is characterized by a transformation from one participant within a broader alternative (punk, cultural, youth…) scene into an autonomous organization. In the period of rising nationalism, their key work is the monumental retro-avant-garde theatrical event Krst pod Triglavom (Baptism under Triglav), based on motifs from Prešeren’s epic Krst pri Savici (The Baptism at the Savica). In the period of the disappearance of the original state, political, and cultural framework (1991–1995), the third sequence unfolds: the transformation of the NSK collective into the NSK State in Time, without permanent territory, with temporary “liberated zones,” such as NSK State Sarajevo, established in 1995 when Laibach held two concerts in the still-besieged city as part of the Occupied Europe NATO tour.
NSK poster
Why an exhibition by a musical group in the gallery of a designers’ association? First of all, because Laibach were never just a band. In fact, among the core members, none is a musician in the traditional sense of the word (just as, for example, Brian Eno is not). They are authors of numerous manifesto-like texts, yet they are neither writers nor essayists. They produced images and graphics, yet they are not painters – after all, was Adolf Hitler not also a painter? Their images are more manifestos than artifacts that, through craftsmanship, address problems of visual form.
Laibach & Tito, photo: Jane Štravs, 1984
They are not considered “kings of performance” either, although they often more radically than the “queen of performance,” Marina Abramović, annulled the boundary between life and art. In the last decades of his work, the great Branko Vučićević – film critic, essayist, screenwriter, assistant director, in essence a co-author of the films of Dušan Makavejev, Želimir Žilnik, Bahrudin Bata Čengić, and Karpo Godina; writer, editor, and translator – used to say that he had, in fact, always been engaged in design. In the strict sense, this was true only in a few cases, among them the design of the epochal book Mixed Media by Bora Ćosić (1970), in which young members of Laibach found the photograph of a cup with a swastika reproduced in the problematic image exhibited at the PM Gallery in 1983. This resulted in the removal of the exhibition and a police escort to the train for Ljubljana, accompanied by the message: “Go and show that beauty of yours somewhere else!” Laibach, therefore, also engage in design. Not only because some members were indeed students of the Ljubljana School of Design while others studied graphic technologies, nor merely in the narrow sense of designing posters and record sleeves. Their entire body of work is an operation in the mode of design. (…)
– from the text by Marko Golub and Dejan Kršić