Book presentation and discussion: Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory
Monday, March 25, 2013, at 18:00, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3, Ljubljana
Part 1: Presentation of the book: Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory
Speakers: Urška Jurman, programme manager of the Igor Zabel Association and Zoja Skušek, co-editor of the selection of texts for the Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory and editor of the Slovene editions of Igor Zabel's texts Eseji I – III, published by /*cf. Publishing House between 2006 and 2010.
Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory brings for the first time a comprehensive selection of Igor Zabel’s writings in the English language. This important translation brings forward Zabel’s extraordinary analytical and emphatic thinking and writing on modern and contemporary art from Socialist Realism and Conceptual Art to Post-Modernism and art of the 1990s, particularly in Slovenia and Eastern Europe.
Part 2. Discussion: Reflections on Contemporary Art
Speakers: Zdenka Badovinac (Director of Moderna Galerija), Jurij Krpan (Artistic Director of Kapelica Gallery), Tadej Pogačar (artist and Director of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute), Igor Španjol (Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova)
Moderator: Urška Jurman
Igor Zabel was one of the key art historians and theoreticians in Slovenia who defined contemporary art as an art historical concept and not only as artistic production created in the present, in the literal meaning of the word. In his writings, Igor Zabel also repeatedly examined how a particular art concept is to be understood, especially when a certain conception has become canonised in the art historical narrative. In this regard, the presentation of the English translation of his texts collected under the title Contemporary Art Theory and written between the beginning of the 1990s and his death in 2005 seems to make sense in Slovenia above all as a discussion on the concept of contemporary art itself – its aesthetical, politico-economic and ideological implications – and the theoretical tools we use today to interpret and historicise it and consider its perspectives.
Organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in cooperation with the Moderna galerija and SCCA-Ljubljana – World of Art Programme and with support of the ERSTE Foundation.