Seminar

The biannual Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory was created in 2008 by Mateja Kos Zabel, Bojan Zabel and the ERSTE Foundation to honour the memory of Slovenian curator, critic and writer Igor Zabel (1958 - 2005). It aims to contribute to contemporary debates around art history and curatorship in order to encourage the exchange of knowledge and the creation of visual art and culture networks linking Eastern and Central Europe. In its first year, the award went to Zagreb-based collective WHW, and this year's recipient is professor Piotr Piotrowski, who was, until recently, the director of the National Museum of Warsaw.

The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010 will be presented in Barcelona, as a result of the collaboration between the ERSTE Foundation (Vienna) and the MACBA. A seminar entitled Writing Art History. Dialogues in the present continuous has been organised to coincide with the awards ceremony. The seminar seeks to expand the geographic scope of the Igor Zabel Award by connecting the historiography of Eastern and Central Europe with other cultural and geographical contexts, particularly Southern Europe.


In the seminar, Professor Piotr Piotrowski will impart the inaugural lecture "Writing Art History after 1989," in which he suggests that 1989 should not just be seen as the year of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, but also as the start of a global process, thus putting forward the possibility of redefining the terms of art history. The lecture "Peuples exposés, peuples figurants" by professor Georges Didi-Huberman (École d'Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, París) will expand the horizon of the seminar: from the historiography of art to knowledge related to images.



The two lectures will provide a point of departure for an open debate among six historians and curators who work in different geographic contexts. The participants are Edit András (art historian, Budapest), Fouad Asfour, (linguist and independent writer, Johannesburg), Zdenka Badovinac (director of the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana), Ivet Curlin (member of WHW, Zagreb), Daniel Grún (art historian, Bratislava) and Laurence Rassel (director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona). The debate will be moderated by Chus Martínez, Chief Curator, MACBA.

Co-produced with:
Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory
ERSTE
With the collaboration of:
AECID

Programme

Friday December 10, from 4 pm to 7.30 pm

Writing Art History after 1989
Lecture by Piotr Piotrowski

Peuples exposés, peuples figurants
Lecture by Georges Didi-Huberman

Debate
With Edit András (art historian, Budapest), Fouad Asfour, (linguist and independent writer, Johannesburg), Zdenka Badovinac (director of the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana), Ivet Curlin (member of WHW, Zagreb), Daniel Grún (art historian, Bratislava) and Laurence Rassel (director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona). Moderator: Chus Martínez, chief curator, MACBA.

MACBA Public Programs
Tel. (+34) 93 481 46 81
mrubio [at] macba [dot] cat