Alenka Pirman graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (1989). She was editor-in-chief of the magazines Likovne besede and M’zin (1991-92), artistic director of the Škuc Gallery (1990-96), assistant director of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts - Ljubljana (1997-99; now SCCA-Ljubljana Centre for Contemporary Arts), vice-president of the Management Board of the International Contemporary Art Network (ICAN, 1998-99) and co-founder and mentor of the World of Art educational programme for contemporary art curators (1996-98). She was editor and head of the Artservis.org Internet service (2001-04), and a taxi driver (2007-08). She is one of the iniciators of the Artwork project which she has been coordinating since 2007.

In the 1990s, her work was predominantly related to three fictitious institutions: the SK8 Museum (1991-93), the RIGUSRS - Research Institute for Geo Art Statistics of the Republic of Slovenia (1997, with Vuk Ćosić and Irena Woelle), and the Domestic Research Institute (1994-98). She then collaborated with artistic collectives/platforms like Luther Blissett/01.org (1998) and The Bughouse (2002-03). She has carried out several methodological exhibition projects, e.g. with a German loanword collection (Arcticae horulae, 1995), with a deposited collection of the Museum of Slovene Police (The Case. Art and Criminality, 2005, with Biserka Debeljak). She is a founding member of the Domestic Research Society (2004), where she develops collaborative exhibition and Internet projects (The Cabinet, 2005-; Unleashed Tongue, 2004-; Indija.si, 2007-).