The international conference on the occasion of the 2020 Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory– prepared in collaboration with the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana – reconsiders the universal during the era of global capitalism and pandemic, and aims to rethink our common future and the presence of art in the (entire) world that is (not yet) our world. Speakers include: T. J. Demos, Boris Groys, ruangrupa, Apolonija Šušteršič, Alberto Toscano, and Alenka Zupančič.

Day 1  ⁄  3. 12.

How art today imagines universalism and how it represents the all-encompassing forces, such as the force of global capitalism

Day 2  ⁄  4. 12.

On the relation between the particular and concrete and the universal in the field of contemporary art

Venue

Online streaming from Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Conference theme

The conference reconsiders the questions that concern both human society and the entire planet, thus, all of nature, and are, in this sense, universal. The time of the coronavirus pandemic has accumulated and more clearly exposed various crises – the environmental crisis, the migrant crisis and the crisis of public systems, especially of healthcare, education and culture – which all have a common denominator: global capitalism.

Speakers and moderator

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ
Slovenian philosopher and social theorist, Alenka Zupančič works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences.

BORIS GROYS
Art critic, media theorist, curator, and philosopher, Boris Groys is currently Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

ALBERTO TOSCANO
Reader in Critical Theory and Codirector of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

APOLONIJA ŠUŠTERŠIČ
Architect and artist, Apolonija Šušteršič graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana (1992) and completed her postgraduate studies in art at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1996).

RUANGRUPA
Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa, established 2000, it is a nonprofit organization that supports the idea of art within the urban context by involving artists as well as people from other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, and media to provide critical observations and views on Indonesian urban contemporary issues.

T. J. DEMOS
Award-winning writer and professor of visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and director of its Center for Creative Ecologies.

DRAŽEN DRAGOJEVIĆ- Moderator
Dražen Dragojević moves between Berlin-Ljubljana, culture-theory-media, concepting-producing-communicating-engaging, books-television-stage-galleries-film-clubs.

Registration for online streaming: https://award.igorzabel.org/conference