[artinfo] Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010

[tranzit. hu office]

The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory acknowledges the work of a
cultural protagonist whose work is dedicated to internationally
broaden the knowledge of visual culture in the Central and South
Eastern European region. The laureate is selected by an international
jury. The jury was appointed by ERSTE Foundation and in 2010 consists
of the following members: Edit András, art historian (Hungary/USA),
Chus Martínez, curator (Spain), Tadej Pogacar, artist (Slovenia).
Candidates for the award are international curators, theorists,
writers, critics who are coming from or living and/or working in the
region, whose work spans Central and South Eastern Europe
respectively. In 2010 in addition to the award of EUR 40,000 four
working grants were awarded, three by the jury, one by the laureate.

Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory - Winner 2010 (EUR 40,000):

Piotr Piotrowski is honored with the Igor Zabel Award for his art
history writing in Eastern Europe, which is hardly visible in the
canonised, so-called universal art history. Piotrowski is Professor
ordinarius at the Institute of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University
in Poznan (Poland). Since August 2009 he is also the Director of the
National Museum in Warsaw. The jury expressed its appreciation and
support for his work and acknowledges "one of the most outstanding art
historians of the Central Eastern European region, who has exceptional
professional achievements". Piotr Piotrowski has a significant body of
writings focusing on transnational modern and contemporary art. His
main goal is to subvert traditional geography of art that functions as
a tool of subordination, and to offer the marginal position as an
analytic advantage based on his conviction that "the margin can reveal
elements that are invisible from the centre". He is active in setting
up a network, as well as disseminating the specific art practices and
ideas that originate in the region, outside of the centres. By doing
so, Piotr Piotrowski acts as a sort of cultural ambassador.
See also www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~piotrpio/

Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory - Grants 2010 (EUR 8,000 each):

In 2010 the jury decided to award three working grants instead of two,
because among "the strongest nominees were single individuals,
communities, and collectives. They pursue very different activities,
work in very different terrains (...) and we wanted to honor the best
ones from each category."

Maja and Reuben Fowkes, of Croatian and British origin respectively,
are partners in private and professional life. They live and work in
Budapest, Hungary. Their activity has become a stimulating and
important force in the Central Eastern European region. They are
involved in a number of different activities as initiators and
participants, in curating (1956: Revolution is not a Garden Party,
2006; 1968: Revolution I love You, 2008; 1989: Revolutionary
Decadence, 2009; etc.), writing, editing accompanying publications,
organizing conferences. The Social East Seminar, a conference series
held in different cities and venues has evolved an alternative
institution in the course of the last couple of years. They bring back
issues and topics which seem to have disappeared from the scenes of
the ex East bloc, such as political and subversive practices, the
heritage of revolutionary and utopian thinking, the memory discourse
and sustainability.
See also www.translocal.org

The Peace Institute is a non-profit research institution developing
interdisciplinary research activities in sociology, anthropology,
philosophy, cultural policy and political science based in
Ljubljana/Slovenia. It was founded in 1991 by a group of independent
intellectuals who had been civil society activists in the
post-socialist processes in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. Especially in the
field of education the Peace Institute's project The Workers' Punk
University offers new possibilities for alternative (self)-education
that is based on new forms of solidarity, inclusive politics and free
thinking. The jury stress that Peace Institute in last twenty years
did extremely important contribution to critical research of social,
cultural and political transitional processes and was deeply dedicated
in dealing with marginalised social and political themes, linking them
to educational practice.
See also www.mirovni-institut.si

Raluca Voinea is a young scholar and curator based in Romania. She is
especially interested in researching how contemporary art practice and
artistic research enhances our common understanding of the social. Her
interest in writing, her attentiveness to history, exhibition history
in particular, makes her research relevant since it helps to connect
fields and also different generations that experience history, time
and even the very understanding of art in totally different forms. Her
research has the quality of opening up, sharing, including, expanding
not only the questions, the references, but also the concepts we
inherited to address certain practices, to talk and to write about
art.

Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory - Grant 2010 (EUR 12,000):

One working grant is traditionally dedicated by the laureate. Piotr
Piotrowski awarded Daniel Grúň with this working grant.

Daniel Grúň is an art historian, curator, writer and art critic. He
studied art history at Trnava University (Slovak Republic) and later
received a Visegrad Scholarship at Adam Mickiewicz University in
Poznan and Charles University in Prague. In 2009 he completed his PhD
thesis and published it as a book titled Archeology of Art Criticism.
Slovak Art of the 1960s and its Interpretations, dealing with artistic
discourse in Czechoslovakia during the democratisation process of the
socialist regime. Currently he works as an Assistant Professor at the
Department of Theory and History of Art, Academy of Fine Arts and
Design in Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

The Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory was granted for the first
time in 2008 to the Croatian curatorial collective What, How & for
Whom (WHW). Besides the award Fouad Asfour, Erden Kosova and the
Serbian collective Prelom were awarded with a working grant.

www.erstestiftung.org