Working Across Uncertain Grounds

The event brings together three conversations with this year’s recipients of the Igor Zabel Award Grant, in which they will discuss questions of displacement, exile, and both forced and professional mobility, alongside the challenges of working within and beyond institutional structures amid political and economic instability. The tackled issues will include the transformation and institutionalisation of artistic practices during periods of transition, questions of the periphery, the long-term social consequences of war, and the responses of cultural workers to these consequences. Bringing together perspectives from post-socialist and post-colonial contexts, the participants will consider how cultural infrastructures are sustained, reimagined, or rebuilt across shifting political realities and regional geographies.

Tania Arcimovich is a researcher, curator, and art writer from Minsk and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Germany. Working across art history, theatre studies, sociology, and curatorial practice, Arcimovich investigates independent Belarusian art during political transitions and displacement. 

Octavian Esanu is a curator, art writer, and Associate Professor and Art Galleries Director at the American University of Beirut. His research focuses on artistic infrastructures and the legacies of post-socialist Eastern Europe and the postcolonial Middle East, as well as the institutionalisation of artistic practice during periods of political and economic transition in these regions. 

Alona Karavai is a cultural worker, curator, and art writer, as well as the co-founder and leader of Asortymentna Kimnata in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Currently she is based in Kyiv, exploring themes of peripheries, absence, vitality, and death. She runs the School of Death, a self-organised initiative that examines the collective culture of mourning through performative and collaborative practices.

Pia Brezavšček a philosopher and art historian, currently working as the program co-director of the City of Women, an association that runs an annual festival in Ljubljana since 1995. Between 2019 and 2025, she was the editor-in-chief of Maska, a journal for contemporary performing arts and is the editor-in-chief of the Maska book publishing house. Her topics of interest are feminism and contemporary philosophies of the body.

Jakub Gawkowski is an art historian and Chief Curator at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, where he recently co-curated the museum's new permanent exhibition of its 20th- and 21st-century art collection. He also co-curated the 2026 Matter of Art Biennale, held in Prague and Pardubice, and is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna. 

Vasif Kortun is a curator, writer, and educator based in Ayvalık, Turkey. He was the founding Director of Research and Programs at SALT in Istanbul and has curated numerous exhibitions and biennials, including the Taipei Biennale (with Manray Hsu, 2008) and the 9th Istanbul Biennial (with Charles Esche, 2005). 

The event – held in English – is part of the Igor Zabel Award 2026 programme and is organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Cankarjev dom, and the ERSTE Foundation.
The award honors outstanding achievements in the visual arts in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It has been conferred biennially since 2008 in cooperation with the initiator of the award, ERSTE Foundation (Vienna), and the Igor Zabel Association (Ljubljana).