Zdenka Badovinac has been appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The museum, with one of the best collections of post-war avant-garde art from the post-Yugoslav region, will be run by Badovinac for four years.
Zdenka Badovinac is known internationally as a long-time director of the Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art) and MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Ljubljana; and for her oustanding curatorial work and important theoretical contributions as a writer in the international discourses on the geopolitics of contemporary art in Eastern Europe and global art history. When she was awarded the Igor Zabel award in 2020, Zdenka Badovinac was recognized as one of the most important and rigorous locally rooted and globally connected professionals in the field of cultural production of the past decades.
Badovinac initiated the first Eastern European art collection, Arteast 2000+. Her most recent exhibition is Bigger Than Myself: Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia, MAXXI, Rome. Her most recent book is Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe (Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, 2019. She is a founding member of L’Internationale, a confederation of seven modern and contemporary European art institutions, and President of CIMAM, International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, 2010–13.