This catalogue presents the exhibition Inexplicable Presence (Curator’s Working Place) curated by Igor Zabel at Ljubljana’s Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art in 1997 and at the Celje Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1998. The posthumous publication emerges from the recent finding of an outline of the catalogue that Zabel intended to self-publish.Â
The authors whose writings appear in this book come from twelve different countries and represent a range of disciplines and interests: they are art historians, philosophers, cultural theorists and activists, critics, curators, and poets, with most of them falling into at least two or three of these categories. All have made important contributions to contemporary art and cultural production, art history writing, and critical thought within, and sometimes far beyond, the region once known, problematically, as ‘Eastern Europe.’
Republications is the first volume of Archive Journal’s hors-séries. Each issue of the series is commissioned to authors whose research is close to the editorial line of the journal. For the inaugural issue Archive’s editors have invited French curators and art critics Virginie Bobin and Mathilde Villeneuve. Taking as a starting point the notion of ‘republication’, the contents of this publication have been compiled through a collective process over the course of multiple editorial meetings in Berlin, Aubervilliers and Paris between 2011 and 2012. The texts assembled in this volume have been written in English or in French.