Exhibition opening: 24 September 2025, 8 p.m.

Exhibition curator: Vladimir Vidmar
 

It is now twenty years since the passing of Igor Zabel (1958–2005), the art historian, curator, and all-around intellectual who left an indelible, multi-layered mark in the field of art in Slovenia and beyond. On 24 September 2025, we are opening an exhibition staged in his memory, titled Inexplicable Absence. Tracing Igor Zabel’s Curatorial Practice. Based on a selection of his exhibitions, it will reflect the ideas he pursued and the approaches he adopted in his curatorial work.

As a curator and theorist – although loath to describe himself this way – Igor Zabel remains a cherished figure in the collective memory of Slovenia’s art world, and his absence is still felt. Playing a key role in bringing about the shift of the art paradigm in Slovenia with regard to contemporary art, he was nonetheless a connecting figure: he brought together various art-historical affiliations and artistic approaches in his work, forging productive connections between artistic practices with seemingly divergent contexts. Zabel was a tireless seeker of new readings of artistic phenomena, following in his work a logic inherent to art, the immediacy of its address, and its capacity to form its own systems and idioms. This informed his curatorial approach, to which Inexplicable Absence pays homage.

Zabel’s work was underpinned by a genuine and deep personal involvement, a direct dialogue with artists and an immersion in their ideational worlds, often building on the ephemeral and immaterial, and discovering art in the everyday and elusive. These are the parameters our exhibition follows as well: based on five exhibitions Igor Zabel staged in collaboration with the artists, Inexplicable Absence highlights five curatorial approaches specific to his work in a way that is not documentary, but aims to address these specific qualities in a unified presentation. The exhibition further includes an artistic/exhibition project by Canadian artist Christophe Barbeau titled MG-1997-PRED-45, which subtly reflects Zabel’s exhibition Inexplicable Presence: Curator’s Working Place, and through it, his curatorial practice, in the manner of an embedded reporter. The visitor enters this specific map of Zabel’s practice, this topography of a “positive negative,” as a seeker recreating the jigsaw of Zabel’s exhibitions with the aid of abstracted elements.

The importance and extent of Zabel’s curatorial work and writings are further illustrated with his bibliography and list of exhibition projects that have been prepared by Teja Merhar and Ana Obid. Both will be available online on the websites of Moderna galerija and the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.

Another part of our commemoration of the twenty years since Zabel’s death will be a one-day conference on 24 October at the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition Inexplicable Absence. Tracing Igor Zabel’s Curatorial Practice is staged by Moderna galerija in collaboration with the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.

Supported by: ERSTE Foundation, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia