Abstract :
In May 1997, Igor Zabel organized Inexplicable Presence (Curator’s Working Place), an 11-day exhibition hosted within a basement room of the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana. In this intimate experiment, Zabel prompted the artists with a short story and a photograph as the curatorial point of departure for their contributions. The small room was used as both the curator’s temporary office and exhibition space; a space where Zabel tried a different way of exhibiting and encountering the visitors within “the peripheral, ephemeral, accidental, and arbitrary“, and envisioned “the possibility of low-budget projects“. The same moment Inexplicable Presence was unfolding, an international exhibition, Epicenter Ljubljana, curated by Harald Szeemann and commissioned for the European Cultural Month, was being held upstairs in the rest of the museum’s exhibition rooms.
This lecture explores the simultaneity of those two exhibitions as an opportunity to examine two different masculine curatorial archetypes – Zabel/Szeemann – working in two different scales, taking place within the same museum at the same time. This synchronicity emphasizes the radically small scale of Inexplicable Presence, and the importance of its reflection on the figure of the curator. As Zabel writes: “The emphatically personal or even arbitrary nature of the work often characteristic of the contemporary curator is actually the deconstruction of the position of power and selection.“ This lecture aims to correct a lack of critical scholarship about Zabel’s lesser-known exhibition Inexplicable Presence by drawing from his own writing on it, made newly available through the recent publishing of the original catalogue.