PERSPECTIVE COMRADESHIP

Publication: Comradeship

Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe is a collection of essays by Zdenka Badovinac, a forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director, and scholar. It captures her influential voice in international conversations rethinking the geopolitics of art after the fall of communism. A ferocious critic of unequal negotiations between East and West, and a historian of the avant-garde art that emerged in socialist and post-socialist countries in the last century, she has been an advocate for radical institutional forms.

“Whip smart, politically astute, curatorially inventive: Zdenka Badovinac is nothing less than the most progressive and intellectually rigorous female museum director in Europe. This anthology includes key essays accompanying her series of brilliant exhibitions in Ljubljana, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the differences between former east and former west. For anyone seeking curatorial alternatives to the neoliberal museum model of relentless expansion and dumbed-down blockbusters, Badovinac is a galvanizing inspiration.” —Claire Bishop, art historian and critic Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe by Zdenka Badovinac Edited by J. Myers-Szupinska Foreword by Kate Fowle Published by ICI, distributed by D.A.P. $19.95

Comradeship is the third book in the Perspectives in Curating series, which offers timely reflections by curators, artists, critics, and art historians on emergent debates in curatorial practice around the world. Previous titles in the series include: Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012) and Talking Contemporary Curating (2015) by Terry Smith.

ICI publications are made possible in part by the generous support of the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, and contributions from ICI’s Board of Trustees, Leadership Council, and International Forum. Additional funding for Comradeship was made available by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Visit our website to order Comradeship and for a complete list of publications.

Spotlight: Comradeship Reading Group

To coincide with the publication of Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe by Zdenka Badovinac, ICI formed the Comradeship Reading Group. Artists, curators, musicians, writers and other cultural producers met monthly to consider how the breadth of material Badovinac covers in her collected writing intersects with contemporary practice in the context of New York. The discussion series, conceived by ICI’s Director of Programs Amanda Parmer, ran from February 2019 to February 2020. Each session, free and open to the public, focused on a single chapter from the publication, and was led by two of the series’ Core Participants, who included Shehab Awad, Margot Bouman, Yin Ho, Ladi’Sasha Jones, Carlos Kong, Lynn Maliszewski, Birgit Rathsman, Jovana Stokic, and Mike Tan.

Comradeship Reading Group, ICI New York.

The experiment of our Comradeship Reading Group was two-fold, to immerse ourselves in the specific historical and geopolitical contexts of Zdenka Badovinac’s curatorial practice while rethinking her critical insights in relation to our current work as cultural producers within the artistic landscape of New York. Comradeship allows for readers to grasp critical ideas that emerge directly from Badovinac’s curatorial, institutional, and writing practice. By attuning to the local histories and political imaginaries embedded within artworks produced in Central and Eastern Europe during and after state socialism, Badovinac’s curatorial practice performs the “self-historicization” that it advocates. The numerous case studies of her essays offer a method for conceiving our responsibility towards reframing artistic practices that lie outside of art historical narratives presented in Western institutions. Her writing enabled our group to view history as an incomplete project, and curating as a collaborative act for voicing history’s new narratives, and creating different structures of communality.

Through the Reading Group, Badovinac’s writing enabled us to see New York’s art ecosystem and our roles within it with new eyes, as both contrasts and similarities were productively revealed between her curatorial context in Ljubljana and our readings of it in New York. And when I think of the many conversations, alliances, friends, and modes of comradeship that emerged throughout, I can hear Badovinac’s evocative questions: “Is it our task to correct existing histories? Or is it instead to establish alternate forms of cultural production that allow for more utopian arrangements to come into view?”

Carlos Kong is a writer and art historian pursuing a PhD at Princeton University.

ICI’s Curatorial Intensive was established in 2010 as a professional development program for emerging curators, bringing working professionals together to gain new skills and perspectives on pragmatic aspects of curating, as well as to generate an international exchange of ideas and more inclusive curatorial field. The Curatorial Intensive is organized three times a year with partner institutions around the world. It has taken place in 20 cities including Addis Ababa, Auckland, Bangkok, Bogotá, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, and New Orleans, giving access to professional development and international engagement opportunities to a broader community of curators. An unparalleled, dynamic curatorial network of Curatorial Intensive alumni has developed over the last decade, now counting over 450 curators from 70 countries. They represent—and are shaping— the future of curatorial practice.

ICI has developed a series of research fellowships, mentorships, seminars and conferences, and professional convenings, geared in part towards alumni of the Curatorial Intensive as they move from early- to mid-career levels in their practices. These programs serve to sustain the development of multiple curatorial voices, promote mobility, and generate new knowledge in the field.