THE OCCUPIED EUROPE TOUR, 1983/2017

Please note: The piece is, and will be supplied, unframed 

After the ban on using the name 'Laibach' in Slovenia and Yugoslavia 1983, the group decided to go on a tour around Europe, since they couldn’t perform at home. At the time, of course, this was not easy, especially not for an inexperienced and completely unknown group from Eastern Europe, as only few artists from this part of the world had performed successfully in the West, and especially not those with a radical alternative, industrial pedigree. Despite the complete lack of experience and connections, Laibach decided to take the tour to both Eastern and Western Europe. The Berlin Wall was still standing firm at the time, an Iron Curtain also very much existed between the two ideological poles and the tensions of the Cold War along with it. The plan brought a lot of problems as well as adventures. 

In 1982 in London, Laibach had forged friendly relations with the English group Last Few Days (LFD), which was aesthetically similar to Laibach in many respects, only more lyrical.

Each of the groups designed their own poster for the tour, and the idea was to always use both together. LFD produced an elegant poster with its symbol of the black sun and Laibach’s black cross, while Laibach designed a more controversial poster. They used a map of Europe dominated by two naked athletic figures holding large swords in their hands. The figures are actually a statue by the great German sculptor Georg Kolbe from 1935, which was supposed to symbolize a united Europe. His monumental, idealized, homoerotic, naked athletic figures relied on ancient plaster mould casts, and such statues can still be found all over the world today. The problem is that the Nazis appropriated Kolbe’s style of creation and declared the artist one of the major sculptors of National Socialism (despite the fact that he refused to portray Adolf Hitler and collaborated with modernists such as Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe, and as the president of the Deutscher Künstlerbund [German Association of Artists] he also promoted artists whose works were classified as degenerate art in the Third Reich). Due to this connection with Nazism and the Nazi aesthetic canon, the poster provoked a lot of outrage and protests, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the two groups played two concerts, in West Berlin and Hamburg.

Terms and details:

Upon prior request, it is possible to view artwork live at a Laibach WTC location in Ljubljana, Slovenia. If you are interested in doing so, please write to wtc.support@laibach.org. 

The listed price includes 9,5% value-added tax (VAT). If you are located outside the EU, or are a legal entity that is part of EU reverse charge system, you may take this into account when submitting your offer.

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