Zdenka Badovinac won the Igor Zabel Prize for 2020
Published originally by Artguide, November 5, 2020.
The winner of the Igor Zabel Prize for 2020 is Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana (MG + MSUM). She received the award for "Outstanding Institutional Leadership", "Radical curatorial work and significant contribution to the international discourse related to the geopolitics of contemporary art in Eastern Europe and world art history." Zdenka Badovinac became the head of the Ljubljana Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993 and by initiating the creation of the first collection of Eastern European art - 2000+ Arteast Collection - turned it into one of the most progressive and influential European museum institutions. The jury also highlighted the important contribution of Badovinac to new paradigms of art history, institutional criticism and solidarity strategies in the field of contemporary art. “Her remarkable achievements confirm
Badanowitz was Commissioner for the Austrian Pavilion at the Sao Paulo Biennale (2002) and the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1993–1997, 2005). In 2011–2013 she was President of the International Committee of Museums and Collections of Contemporary Art (CIMAM). Works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana were presented in 2015 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow at the exhibition The Grammar of Freedom. Five Lessons ", where Badanowitz was a co-curator, and in 2016 as a curator she presented the exhibition" NSK: From Capital to Capital "in Garage - the first large-scale exposition of the Slovenian art group Neue Slowenische Kunst in Russia.
Established in 2008, the prize is awarded by the ERSTE Foundation and the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory every two years and is awarded to art historians, curators and art theorists who have dedicated their work to deepening and expanding knowledge of the visual arts and culture of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The total prize fund of the award is € 76,000. In 2014 and 2016, Russian curators - Yekaterina Degot and Victor Misiano - became laureates of the award .