Art Historian Suzana Milevska is the winner of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2012
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Art historian, curator and theorist of visual art and culture Suzana Milevska from Skopje, Macedonia is the recipient of this year’s Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. Initiated and funded by ERSTE Foundation, the biennial award recognises outstanding cultural activities related to the Central and South Eastern European region. Additionally, grants were given to the Berlin-based Slavicist Sabine Hänsgen; art historian Klara Kemp-Welch, from London; and the European Roma Cultural Foundation, based in Budapest. The award ceremony was held in Warsaw at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art on 16 November, accompanied by a conference and presentation of the book Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory.
Suzana Milevska, art historian, curator and theorist of visual art and culture, is honoured with the Igor Zabel Award for her interdisciplinary approach to both theoretical and curatorial practices. Her work focuses on topics such as art in post-socialist and transitional societies, collaborative and participatory art practices, gender differences and feminist art, and the construction of visual memory in photographic archives, to name just a few areas. One of her most notable recent curatorial projects was The Renaming Machine (2008–2010), which focused on the politics of renaming and overwriting memory in politics, art and visual culture in general. In recent years, she has conducted in-depth research projects and prepared exhibitions, talks and symposiums on Roma issues, working mostly with Roma artists. Milevska also remains active in the local Macedonian art scene as a curator and theorist, where her work plays a vital role for the next generation of artists, theorists and curators. In this respect, the jury views her work as a continuation of the basic premises and principles embodied by the practice of Igor Zabel.
The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory supports the work of art historians and theorists in Central and South Eastern Europe and highlights the notion of arts and culture, encouraging the production of cultural knowledge and exchange between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ The laureate is selected by an international jury appointed by the ERSTE Foundation and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory. In 2012, the jury consisted of the following members: Alenka Gregorič, curator and director of Mestna Galerija (Ljubljana); Yuri Leiderman, artist (Berlin and Moscow); and Hanna Wróblewska, director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw).
Book launch of Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory
Edited by Igor Španjol
Selection of texts by Zoja Skušek and Barbara Borčić
Published by JRP|Ringier
In co-edition with Les presses du réel and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, ERSTE Foundation and Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana.
This book brings for the first time a comprehensive selection of Igor Zabel’s writings in English. 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 Contextual Art, particularly in Slovenia and South-Eastern Europe.
