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The Igor Zabel Award 2020 Went to Ljubljana
Zdenka Badovinac, once a colleague of Igor Zabel, has been honoured among other things for her outstanding performance as long-time director of Moderna galerija.
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On 4 December 2020, Zdenka Badovinac, curator, art historian, writer, and long-time director of the Moderna galerija, received the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2020. The jury awarded her the prize “for her outstanding institutional leadership as the director of the Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) in Ljubljana as well as for her radical curatorial work and significant contributions as a writer and editor to international discourses on the geopolitics of contemporary art in Eastern Europe and global art history. Zdenka Badovinac is one of the most important and rigorous locally rooted and globally connected professionals in the field of cultural production in recent decades.”
The award has been conferred biennially since 2008. It acknowledges exceptional achievements of curators, art historians, theorists, art writers, and critics whose work supports, develops or investigates visual art and culture in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The award is an initiative of ERSTE Foundation and organised by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory (Ljubljana). It is named in honour of the distinguished Slovenian curator and art historian Igor Zabel (1958–2005).
The award is not by application. An international jury selects the laureate, based on the proposals given by ten nominators. In addition to the award of EUR 40,000, three working grants of EUR 12,000 each are awarded, two by the jury, one by the laureate. Endowed with total prize money of EUR 76,000, the Igor Zabel Award represents one of the most generous and prestigious prizes for cultural activities related to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
On 27 November 2020, the discussion Borderline Syndrome and Energies of Defence kicked off the programme of the award days. Twenty years after Ljubljana hosted the European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 3 – for which Igor Zabel acted as coordinator - Šejla Kamerić, Renata Salecl, and Kathrin Rhomberg looked at its central theme through the lens of today’s realities. The international conference The Entire World as Our World, prepared in collaboration with Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, was held on 3 and 4 December. Speakers included T. J. Demos, Boris Groys, Ade Darmawan/ruangrupa, Apolonija Šušteršič, Alberto Toscano, and Alenka Zupančič. On the evening of 4 December, the award ceremony of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2020 was broadcast online for the first time.
The jury consisted of Šejla Kamerič (artist, Sarajevo), Antony Gardner (art historian, Oxford), Franciska Zólyom (curator and director of the GfZK – Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig).
Moderator Ksenija Horvat, Zdenka Badovinac, and Urška Jurman of the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory during the award ceremony. Photo: Nada Žgank
The 2020 nominators were: Pawel Althamer (artist, Warsaw), Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (curator, writer, editor, Paris/Ljubljana), Vjera Borozan (art historian, curator, Prague), Mira Gakjina (curator, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje), Herwig Höller (art writer, Moscow/Graz), Eva Khachatryan (curator, Yerevan), József Mélyi (art historian, critic, Budapest), Deimantas Narkevičius (artist, Vilnius), Sven Spieker (editor, ARTMargins, Los Angeles/Berlin), and Raluca Voinea (curator, Bucharest).
Grants 2020
The jury also selected the recipients of two grants. The third grant was named by the laureate. The 2020 Igor Zabel Award Grant recipients selected by the jury were:
Slavcho Dimitrov (Skopje), activist, cultural theorist, and curator Slavcho Dimitrov received an Igor Zabel Grant in recognition of his contributions to reimagining the cultural and social life of the Western Balkan region, and for bringing LGBTQIA+ and women’s rights and struggles to the heart of that vision.
Katalin Erdődi (Vienna/Budapest), curator, dramaturg, and cultural worker The second Igor Zabel Grant went to Katalin Erdődi in recognition of her locally embedded and inclusive curatorial practice, distinguished by its scope as well as its critically reflexive and joyful qualities. Informed by a variety of artistic and activist methods, her work aims to enhance bottom-up social participation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, trigger processes of democratisation, and raise ecological awareness.
The third grant recipient, selected by the laureate, Zdenka Badovinac, was:
Ivana Bago (Zagreb), curator, art historian, and art writer Ivana Bago received the Igor Zabel Grant in recognition of her excellence and insistence on the art historical research, writing, and exhibiting of Yugoslav and Eastern European art in the past decade as well as for her remarkable contribution to the formation of new approaches to writing and curating in this region.
Photo: Slavcho Dimitrov
Photo: Katalin Erdődi
Photo: Ivana Bago
Previous award recipients
The first award was given in 2008 in Ljubljana, the city where Igor Zabel lived and worked. It went to the Croatian curatorial collective What, How & for Whom (WHW), currently the artistic directors of Kunsthalle Wien. The art historian Piotr
Piotrowski (1952–2015) received the award in 2010, the North-Macedonian art historian and curator Suzana Milevska in 2012. In 2014, the Russian curator and author Ekaterina Degot, currently director and chief curator of steirischer herbst in Graz, received this accolade. The Russian curator and author Viktor Misiano was an award winner in 2016. Joanna Mytkowska, the Polish art historian, curator and director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, received the Igor Zabel Award 2018.
About Igor Zabel
During his entire professional life, Igor Zabel (1958–2005) was actively involved in many fields of theory and culture – as an art historian, modern and contemporary art curator, writer, literary and art critic, columnist and essayist, translator, and mentor for new generations of curators and critics of contemporary art. As an art historian and curator of Ljubljana’s Moderna galerija, Zabel contributed importantly to the proper historical placement of historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes as well as to contemporary artistic practices in Slovenia and the broader region. His writings represent significant contributions to discourses on the geopolitics of art in Eastern Europe.
igorzabel.org
