Where Do Igor Zabel’s Traces Lead? Conference on the twentieth anniversary of Igor Zabel’s death

In the recent history of Slovenian visual art, the name of Igor Zabel has become almost synonymous with in-depth reflection on a number of artistic practices and phenomena and their sociopolitical contexts. The consideration he gave to the developments in art of his time, thus (also) co-informing them, set high standards for art writing and reinforced his position as a close companion to numerous prominent figures in art in Slovenia. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, the question is thus raised: Where do his traces lead?

The one-day conference traces his work in various directions and on two levels. The first stems directly from Zabel’s practice, developing its dimensions of (self-)reflection in relation to the challenges of our time. The presentations look at how Zabel’s thinking, in particular about the relations between art, the art system, and the broader sociopolitical context, (may) help us tackle the Gordian knots of these relations today. This first part of the conference is in English.

The second part traces Zabel’s dedication to probing the developments in art as they happened. To bring to the fore some of the salient points in his investigations, the common thread of this part of the conference is returning to the medium. Here we consider what Austrian artist and new-media theorist Peter Weibel called Zabel’s “media justice”, i.e., Zabel’s genuine interest in highly diverse artistic practices in terms of the medium. The papers look at how artistic media are conceptualized today, and how theory might address the renewed emphasis artistic practices give to specific media solutions. As the main focus is on the situation in Slovenia, this part of the conference is in Slovenian.

Timetable

9:30–10:00
Arrival, coffee

10:00–10:15
Introductory remarks by the director of Moderna galerija Martina Vovk, the programme manager of the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory Urška Jurman, and the Moderna galerija's curator Vladimir Vidmar

PANEL: Tracing Zabel Today

10:15–10:45
Charles Esche: Re-reading Zabel: Reclaiming Potentials of the 1990s and Early 2000s Some Thoughts on How to Read Igor Zabel in 2025

10:45–11:15
Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas: Between Rupture and Continuity: Revisiting the Curatorial and Theoretical Legacy of Igor Zabel in a Time of Polycrises

11:15–11:45
Christophe Barbeau: “The Peripheral, Ephemeral, Accidental, and Arbitrary”

11:45–12:30
Discussion
Moderated by: Urška Jurman

12:30–14:00
Lunch break

PANEL: Return to the Medium?

14:00–14:30
Marko Jenko: A Matter of Support

14:30–15:00
Kaja Kraner: Transitivity, Protocol, and Atmosphere: Some Points on Contemporary Slovenian Visual Art

15:00–15:30
Maks Valenčič: Subjectifying Medium in Theory-Fiction

15:30–16:15
Discussion
Moderated by: Vladimir Vidmar

Abstracts and biographies

PANEL: Tracing Zabel Today

• Charles Esche: Re-reading Zabel: Reclaiming Potentials of the 1990s and Early 2000s Some Thoughts on How to Read Igor Zabel in 2025

The presentation will take Igor Zabel’s many essays and curatorial texts as a starting point to explore the relevance of his thinking about art and politics for the present moment. Writing twenty to thirty years ago, he could not have foreseen the depths of the artistic and political quagmire into which the “former East and West” have fallen, but his writings are remarkably prescient in understanding how the one-size-fits-all dogma of global art was a submission to the power of capital and how it detached art from its anchors in place and people. He fought for a more complex, situated reading of art history that would allow art to find different, but equally valid, expressions in works that could engage in dialogue with each other rather than in the competitive elimination of neoliberalism. Reading Zabel is also a reminder of the unrealized possibilities of the 1990s and early 2000s and an invitation to artists and curators to pick them up again today, in the aftermath of the unfolding catastrophes of the present.

Charles Esche is a curator and art writer. He is an advisor at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London. From 2004–2024, he was director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. He has co-curated international biennales in Korea, Palestine, Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia. His latest book publications are The Museum is Multiple (Van Abbemuseum, 2024) and Art and Its Worlds (Afterall and Koenig Press, 2021). He is writing a book on demodern thinking with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti to be published by Duke University Press in 2027. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

• Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas: Between Rupture and Continuity: Revisiting the Curatorial and Theoretical Legacy of Igor Zabel in a Time of Polycrises

In her book The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (2024), Fatoş Üstek argues that “existing art institutions are not equipped to deal with the radical social, economic, and environmental change we are living through and engage with advancement in the arts”. She continues that unless art institutions “re-focus on their core purpose and fundamentally transform their organisational structure and operational models, they will start to lose their relevance and influence”. How do art institutions navigate and respond to the “polycrises” (M. Lawrence et al., 2024) characterizing the contemporary moment, caught in the confluence of geopolitical conflicts, demands for political positioning, identity crises, imperatives for ecological sustainability, reductions in public funding, the rise of right-wing governments challenging institutional autonomy, neoliberalism’s subordination of culture to economic value and the crisis of the attention economy? To tackle the question of the “art institution in crisis”, I do not wish to “offer a cure”, as the magazine ArtReview framed the ambition of Üstek’s book, nor to present “new ideas to develop institutional models and directorial and curatorial positions”, as she herself describes it. Rather, the objective of my contribution is to engage with the past – to revisit the theoretical and curatorial legacy of Igor Zabel – in order to provide a deeper understanding of the present moment and the continuing relevance of his work.

Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas is an independent curator and art writer. Her recent curatorial projects include exhibitions at Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna), Lombardi–Kargl as part of curated by (Vienna), HOW Art Museum (Shanghai), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), among others. In 2023, she held a guest professorship at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), where she is also pursuing her doctoral studies. Between 2019 and 2023, she served as director of the Ulay Foundation. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. Born in Ljubljana, she lives and works in Vienna.

• Christophe Barbeau: “The Peripheral, Ephemeral, Accidental, and Arbitrary”

In 1997, Igor Zabel curated Inexplicable Presence (Curator’s Working Place) at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Zabel hosted the exhibition within a basement room of the museum, simultaneously relocating his office there for the exhibition’s 11-day duration. As an intimate experiment aimed at interrogating his own role as a curator, Zabel prompted the artists with a short personal story and a photograph of a certain place in Ljubljana – that had for him a distinct meaning – as the curatorial point of departure for their own contributions. 
In the posthumously published catalogue for Inexplicable Presence, Zabel declares that “As a curator, I find myself more and more attracted by the peripheral, ephemeral, accidental, and arbitrary.” Looking to better understand this psychoanalytical sensibility, this lecture will attempt to unfold the specific path to Zabel’s attraction of “the possibility to create a show using a process which begins with very personal views, ideas, and even obsessions, and then develops into a dialogue between this personal story and the artists’ stories”. Guided by coincidences and lost in translations, this research follows a road through a life of different roles, from Zabel’s studies in comparative literature, to his translations and literary writing, towards a curatorial self-reflexive authorship.

Christophe Barbeau is a curator and artist based in Toronto, Canada. He completed the Master of Visual Studies and Curatorial Studies, at the University of Toronto, during which his research looked at the specific concept of "authorship" relating to the position of curator. Barbeau’s exhibitions and i am the curator of this show1 (Art Museum, University of Toronto, 2018) and Qu’avons-nous fait? [...] (Toronto, 2019) aimed at deconstructing the conventional authorities of the curator and uncovering the political challenges that this figure is facing. His current research concerns a historical look at a specific network of artists, curators, and ideas from Slovenia and what was known as Eastern Europe during the 1990s and the 2000s, taking the form of an apartment exhibition series entitled Kustosova delovna soba (The Curator’s Room) (2021–). 

PANEL: Return to the Medium?

• Marko Jenko: A Matter of Support

The point of departure for the paper is a simple yet far-reaching question: What is materiality? How might it be conceptualized within the visual arts? In Slovenian art history and theory, we are very familiar with a range of terms that attempt – more often descriptively, empirically, or through common-sense reasoning – to grasp arts’ “inward turn” or “self-enclosure”, through notions of self-referentiality, processuality, and related concepts. Whether this “thinking of the self”, this “confrontation with oneself”, as if a reflection on one’s own conditions and history, entails an attempt at (self-)transparency, is a question that constitutes a problem in its own right. Is such transparency even possible? This inward turn, at its most fundamental level, opens up a sequence of questions concerning the very foundations of art: the uses, techniques, and technologies; the media, procedures, supports, and material means; but also the form, appearance, corporeality, and especially the (absence of) meaning. The medium becomes a message without a message. This constellation of questions could be broadly summarized through terms such as “material base”, “corporeality”, “substrate”, or “foundations”. We might recall Benjamin Buchloh’s account of conceptual art exhibitions as assemblies of exposed “intermediaries”: empty pedestals for sculptures (or cubes) and frames (or holes). What becomes apparent is that behind these questions of material foundations lies a persistent concern with mediation – and simultaneously, a kind of dream of immediacy: presence as such, as nothing other than what it is. Let us call this as-suchness. How, then, are materiality and immediacy related? And what consequences do they bear for the interpretation of artworks? At the heart of this paper is a short analysis of David Lynch’s early short film The Alphabet (1969), as a case through which to reflect on these very issues.

Marko Jenko, PhD, studied Art History and French at the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Arts), where he also worked as a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Art History. From 2010 to 2022, he served as senior curator of 20th-century art at Slovenia’s national Museum of Modern Art (Moderna galerija) in Ljubljana. Since 2023, he has been a curator of modern and contemporary art at Muzej Lah in Bled, Slovenia. His theoretical work primarily focuses on issues related to art, art history, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and philosophy. He has translated into Slovenian works by Gérard Wajcman, Jacques Lacan, Colette Soler, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Starobinski, David Freedberg, Daniel Arasse, Monique David-Ménard, and others.

• Kaja Kraner: Transitivity, Protocol, and Atmosphere: Some Points on Contemporary Slovenian Visual Art

My presentation starts from the thesis put forward by Claire Bishop in Disordered Attention (2004), stressing that when considering contemporary art – although the term most often refers to the art of one historically united period, i.e., “post-1989” – the fundamental difference between the post-1990 period and the post-COVID context after 2020 should be given due regard. By making this distinction, Bishop underscores that the digital technology-induced, so-called disordered attention affects not only the reception, but also the aesthetic dimension of the chronologically most contemporary artworks. David Joselit uses the term transitive painting to articulate a similar notion in his 2009 text “Painting Beside Itself,” which remains one of the key references on contemporary painting. On the basis of both these authors’ conclusions, I will analyze a number of selected artworks by emerging Slovenian artists, produced over the past five years. In addition to the aesthetic dimension of the artworks, my focus will be on examining the reasons for the frequent blending of the organic and the technological in contemporary artistic production, and the shift from producing artworks to producing atmospheres.

Kaja Kraner, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Theoretical Sciences at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, and a researcher at the Research Institute of the Fine Arts and Design Academy in Ljubljana. Between 2015 and 2019, she was a member of the editorial board of the journal for criticism and theory of contemporary art ŠUM, and since 2025, she has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal for the Critique of Science. In 2021, she published the scientific monograph Chronopolitics of Art: Changes in Aesthetic Education from Modern to Contemporary Art with Krtina publishing.

• Maks Valenčič: Subjectifying Medium in Theory-Fiction

The research of a medium leads into its interior. What is at the forefront is not the medium or its materiality, but instead, the changes on the level of mediation. And these, paradoxically, do not take place in the medium, but outside it. A certain inversion happens: the interior becomes the exterior, and in mediation, we do not look for the changes within the medium, but outside of it. This is the only way that we can access changes on the level of mediation, the only way we gain an insight into them.

I shall begin my contribution with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the medium and its actualization by Boris Groys. According to Groys, the subject is the one who becomes “a medium of the media – the messenger that transmits the message of the media instead of transmitting its own message. It becomes a medium that makes the workings of the media visible, observable, phenomenologically accessible.” (Groys, “Subjectivity as Medium of the Media”, 2011). The viewpoint of the contribution will be that the essence of the medium – changes on the level of mediation – can only be accessed through subjectivation of the medium, since the changes on this level (the interior of the medium) cannot be accessed in contrast, which is a classic McLuhan viewpoint.

The artists subjectivize the medium when they make the interior of the medium “visible” by studying the limits of mediation, what is possible, what can be transferred. The exterior starts to perform the interior, and the interior becomes visible.

I shall demonstrate the changes on the level of mediation of the medium through the artistic handling of theory-fiction. Through three stages of development of theory-fiction, I shall explain the changes on the level of mediation and why theory-fiction has become the main catalyst to make these changes visible. 

Maks Valenčič is a media theorist and philosopher. He is a researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice as well as an editor at Razpotja magazine and ŠUM, a journal for contemporary art and theory-fiction. At the moment, his research is focused on psychotic accelerationism, a project he began with the eponymous article published in ŠUM #20. In addition, he is a member of the GIA collective and host of the podcast series Technologos, where he and his guests map the implications of the emerging technological civilisation.