Announcing the Igor Zabel Award 2020

The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory ceremony and its accompanying international conference will take place from 3 to 4 December 2020 in Ljubljana. This year’s recipients of the award and grants for exceptional achievements in the field of visual arts in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, as well as the conference programme, will also be broadcast online in addition to taking place as live events.

We kindly invite you to join us this coming December!

The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 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 Southeastern Europe. Named in honour of the distinguished Slovenian curator and art historian Igor Zabel (1958–2005), the award, an initiative of the ERSTE Foundation, has been conferred biennially since 2008. With total prize money of EUR 76,000, it represents one of the most generous and prestigious awards for cultural activities related to Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.

The international conference The Entre World as Our World – prepared in collaboration with the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana – reconsiders the universal during the era of global capitalism and pandemic, rethinking our common future and the presence of art in the (entire) world that is (not yet) our world. Speakers include: T. J. Demos, Suely Rolnik, ruangrupa, Apolonija Šušteršič, Alberto Toscano, and Alenka Zupančič.

Twenty years after Ljubljana hosted the European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 3, we return with Šejla Kamerić, Renata Salecl, and Kathrin Rhomberg to its central theme – “borderline syndrome and energies of defence” – and look at it through the lens of today’s realities.