Abstract :
In 2003, Francesco Bonami, the Artistic Director of the 50th Venice Biennale titled Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, “offered complete autonomy to ten curators to realize their visions” that would together comprise the central “International Art Exhibition”. One of these curators was Igor Zabel. Entitled Individual Systems, Zabel’s exhibition contrasted with the spectacular features of the other curated shows. Subtle and modest, the exhibition centred on the voices of the artists and the “relationship between artistic agency and contemporary global systems”. This exhibition inducted Zabel, previously an important but relatively locally-focused curator, to the global curatorial system of the “world of art”.
This contribution builds on the lecture given at the Exhibiting in Slovenia II symposium in 2022, entitled The Curator’s Rooms. Exploring Zabel’s intimate exhibition Inexplicable Presence (Curator’s Working Place), it focused on the specificity of his self-reflexive curatorial posture. In this different context of Bonami’s claim to end the “Grand Curator” (a direct response to Harald Szeemann’s 2001 Venice Biennale) with his “polyphonic” invitational gesture, I aim to elaborate how Zabel’s Individual Systems furthers his critical commitment to the way he takes on the curator’s “position of power and selection” from within the centre of the Arsenale in Venice.