Book Launch: Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-socialist Europe, Zdenka Badovinac in conversation with Ana Janevski  – Events

Join us at e-flux to celebrate the launch of Zdenka Badovinac’s new book Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-socialist Europe published by ICI. The evening will feature a presentation and conversation with Zdenka Badovinac and Ana Janevski considering the trajectory of Badovinac’s work as it is articulated through her new publication.

“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.

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.

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.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and art critic who has served as Director to the Moderna Galerija (Museum of Modern Art) in Ljubljana since 1993. In her work, she 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 Collection 2000+.

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.

Zdenka Badovinac, Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe is published by ICI and available for preorder here.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The event will be livestreamed on www.e-flux.com/live.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.