A working dinner on our arrival in Ljubljana was an opportunity to engage with the work of renowned Slovenian curator and theorist Igor Zabel (1958-2005) and revisit from a contemporary perspective the historiography of East European art and its origins in the critical debates of the first post-communist decade. Participants took turns commenting on short theoretical extracts of his writing, with Daniel Véri and Magdalena Moskalewicz assigned the following to analyse: “An Eastern artist now becomes attractive for the West, not as somebody producing universal art, but exactly as someone who reflects his particular condition. He is not an only an artist, but particularly a Russian, Polish or Slovene artist, or simply an Eastern artist.”

The participants also had a chance to meet Urška Jurman of the Igor Zabel Association for Art and Theory and receive a copy of Extending the Dialogue, including texts that had already been discussed in our session on defining East European art history.
(MRF)