Occupied Europe Aktion 1995
Charles Krafft at NuArt Exhibition of NuMusic Festival

An installation of collaborations with NSK and works inspired by NSK State Sarajevo action in November 1995. Video, photographs, graphic arts and porcelain sculpture.

NuArt Exhibition of NuMusic Festival
September 6 through November 4, 2007
Rogaland Kunstmuseum
Stavanger, Norway

In the late 1980s, while contemplating the potential of visual art to influence the social order and reflect authority – a phenomena he would later define as the “Iconography of Power and Capital” - artist Charles Krafft discovered an enigmatic group of artists, musicians and intellectuals in the newly independent Republic of Slovenia called NSK.  Krafft was immediately seduced by the construct of the 14-member Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovene Art) collective, which includes a theater company, graphics studio, painters group, philosophy department, and the internationally popular industrial rock band Laibach. He soon arranged for a major exhibition by NSK and a Laibach concert in his native Seattle. This set in motion an association with the group that would indelibly transform his career as a fine artist.

In 1995, with support from the Citizens Exchange Council/Arts Link partnerships program and private patronage, Krafft embarked on a journey to Slovenia to formally collaborate with NSK. It was during this trip that he accompanied designated members of the collective on a “cultural relief” mission to war-ravaged Sarajevo as a photographer for the final leg of Laibach’s ” Occupied Europe: NATO Tour l994 - l995.” Krafft found the experience so subversive it restored his waning faith in the redemptive power of art. His observations and interaction with the beleaguered citizens of Sarajevo inspired his signature “Porcelain War Museum Project,” which debuted at the Ministry of Defence Headquarters in Ljubljana, Slovenia in December 1999 with all the pomp of an international diplomatic affair. Krafft’s arsenal of blue and white Delft-style ceramic weaponry – at once alluring and grotesque – has been subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the globe. This installation documents Krafft’s first collaboration with NSK and examines an important episode in the history of their politicized aesthetics. 

The Sarajevo trip was an extraordinary adventure in a convoy of three armored U. N. vehicles. The route was littered with the charred rubble of small towns, tanks, checkpoints, blasted bridges and stalled traffic. The Laibach-NSK embassy events were a crowded conceptual tour de force conducted over two days in the bullet-riddled National Theater. Nothing coming close to this multimedia cultural relief had happened in Sarajevo since the siege of the city commenced four years ago. The mise en scene of the totaled city certainly lent extra meaning to Laibach’s spooky cover of “Sympathy for the Devil.” You could smell the sulfurs of hell and the stench of death in the snow blowing through the ruins of block after block of shelled hotels, hospitals, homes and shops. The peace accords were announced in Dayton when we were there, but no one we met really cared. They’ve heard it all too many times before. Stayed above the ’84 Winter Olympics Village that is a heap of ruins now. The nebulous front line of the Serb territories was only 300 meters away. Still, life goes on there. The dignity of the surviving victims of this medieval abomination against 20th century civilization is really moving. We all left enriched by their determination to coexist and help each other through the trauma.

-Charles Krafft
Excerpts from an e-mail to a friend, November 29, 1995