February 15, 2019, 7pm
“We are now in the second decade of the West taking interest in art from ‘other’ places. There are many reasons for this development, including the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the ensuing new geopolitical situation in Europe, and the rapid processes of globalization in that decade, all of which have effected lasting changes in the world-map of art.”
Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe gathers twenty years of writings from disparate and hard-to-find sources alongside new texts from the forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director, and scholar Zdenka Badovinac.
Join Zdenka Badovinac and Ana Janevski for a presentation and conversation considering the trajectory of Badovinac’s work as it is articulated through her new publication.
This is the third book in ICI’s PERSPECTIVES IN CURATING series, which offers timely reflections by curators, artists, critics, and art historians on emergent debates in curatorial practice around the world.
Badovinac has been an 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, moreover, an advocate for radical institutional forms: museums responsive to the complexities of the past and commensurate to the demands of the present.
Upcoming Events:
College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference Panel with Zdenka Badovinac, Kate Fowle, J. Myers-Szupinska
Saturday, February 16, 2-3:30pm
New York Hilton Midtown
1335 6th Ave - Rendezvous Trianon
Comradeship Reading Group - First Meeting and Application
Tuesday, February 19th, 6:30-8:30pm
ICI Curatorial Hub
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
Zdenka Badovinac
Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer, who has served since 1993 as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, comprised since 2011 of two locations: the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art. Badovinac’s first exhibition to address these issues was Body and the East—From the 1960s to the Present (1998). She also initiated the first Eastern European art collection, Arteast 2000+. One her most important recent projects is NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Moderna galerija, 2015 (Traveled to Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, (2016), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016) and the Museo Reina Sofía Madrid (2017)); NSK State Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, co-curated with Charles Esche; The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition, Modena galerija, Ljubljana, 2017, co-curated with Bojana Piškur; Sites of Sustainability Pavilions, Manifestos and Crypts, Hello World. Revising a Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin; Heavenly Beings: Neither Human nor Animal, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, co-curated with Bojan Piškur, 2018; Badovinac was Slovenian Commissioner at the Venice Biennale from 1993 to 1997, 2005 and 2017, and Austrian Commissioner at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2002 and the President of CIMAM, 2010–13.
Ana Janevski
Ana Janevski is currently Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art. Most recently, she co-organized Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (with Thomas Lax and Martha Joseph) She has collaborated with many choreographers and artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel, Yvonne Rainer, Rabih Mroué, Boris Charmatz & Musée de la danse, Simone Forti, Martha Rosler, Ralph Lemon, Trajal Harrell. She is the editor of a MoMA Dance Series book on Boris Charmatz and co-editor of Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe (with Roxana Marcoci and Ksenia Nouril). She co-edited with Cosmin Costinas a publication Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?: The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions. From 2007 to 2011, she held the position of Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, where she curated, among many other projects, the large-scale exhibition As Soon As I Open My Eyes I See a Film, on the topic of Yugoslav experimental film and art from the 1960s and 1970s. She also edited a book with the same title. In 2010 she co-curated the first extensive show about experimental film in Yugoslavia, This Is All Film! Experimental Film in Yugoslavia 1951–1991, at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.
