DAN & LIA PERJOVSCHI

Dan and Lia Perjovschi intertwine their two artistic practices and offer the audience multiple visions on society, the role of the artist, and what can be done. Each starts from their own way of looking at society: looking as in seeing, and seeing as in understanding. Lia Perjovschi deconstructs how we see. Dan Perjovschi comments on how society produces an ongoing chronicle of humankind.Dan and Lia Perjovschi are based in Sibiu/Bucharest, Romania, and have some of the most internationally renowned and influential artistic voices in Europe.

Fragments of Humanity shows aesthetically contrasting, critically aligned bodies of works of two artists who are a couple, colleagues, and political subjects all at once.

Trained as painters and working as experimental artists since the 1980s, Dan and Lia have been fighting for autonomy, artistic dignity and for art as a political practice for over thirty years. Following these ideals was an enormous challenge during Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, as they were studying and just starting out as artists. Since then, they have faced other challenges in their lives, artistic careers, and activism.

Both artists analyze how we experience the world and create alternative critical views on humanity. While Dan works excessively with the medium of drawing, creating often humorous minimalist figurations or brief political drawings/texts, Lia experiments with various artistic approaches from performance to drawing, textile sculpture, installation, and painting. Her practice also extends beyond the classical understanding of art, and brings art practice into political artistic education, seeing the interconnection of the role of the artist as an educator and art making as social intervention.

Dan, and Lia in particular, have both invested much of their artistic energy in creating alternative self-organized institutions and archives with the aim to reconstruct art history and open education practice, which Romania had been deprived from in the past. Their intention has also been to question the interpretive power of dominant institutions and canons, and thus to enhance a narrative of art history viewed from the perspective of artists Dan and Lia have encountered along their path. As Lia points out, “I think that it is not enough to provoke, but to propose something, to build possibilities.” Finally, both have experiences with journalism and continually critically process encounters with mass media in their art works.

In Fragments of Humanity, Dan and Lia depart from the need to apply the format of dialogical display to reflect on urgent contemporary questions, such as: where do we go as a community of humans who produce one war after the other, one system of violence and oppression after the other, and what can still be cone, even when the news is bad? What can we do with and through art? What was the role of art during the global pandemic, and in the debate on climate change? They propose “two visions about the personal universe in a local and global context creating the space which becomes a puzzle made of diverse elements.” The exhibition creates a space “to question oneself and the society and maybe even come to some answers,” as the artists put it.

On several occasions, Dan and Lia have created art works for each other as signs of their affection, connection and artistic exchange. As part of the Fragments of Humanity we have a chance to see the (first public showing of a) series of postcards that Dan Perjovschi sent to Lia from every city where he traveled and exhibited since 2008. Postcards to Lia contributes to what he calls “an non-stop chronicle of humankind”. These postcards also bring some intimate energy to the exhibition space and represent a very private document of the artists’ lives (each postcard shows Lia’s, i.e. their private, home address).

Here, as in other projects, Dan depicts societal phenomena through the use of concise language and black permanent marker, creating political, ironic as well as humorous commentaries. This collection holds a lot to discover: there are postcards where Dan looks at events like Documenta 15 and the media debates around it, or reflects on art museums, experiences of making art projects and reactions of audiences to his work. Constantly travelling for work, he remarks on the exhausting work conditions for global contemporary artists. The postcards related to his professional life are mixed together with ones that comment on social and political phenomena, such the War in Ukraine, the Covid pandemic, public space, its boundaries and limitations, contemporary tourism (one of the postcards from Innsbruck presents the city as a place where literally every second person is a tourist).

Postcards to Lia are not “written” in Romanian, but in English—a language that creates maximum access these days. Interestingly, Dan also considers that these cards might be read by “invisible art audiences”, i.e. postal workers whose hands these postcards pass through. During the Covid pandemic, postal workers were often his sole audience (outside of the digital realm), as art venues were closed during lock down. Sometimes, his postcards are also in local languages, Italian, French, German (the language that due to geo-political interests and market expansions returned to “Eastern Europe”). Postcards to Lia are a continuation of Dan’s wall drawings, and the choice of language and their topics reveal the entanglement of art practice and private life.

Postcards to Lia also refer to a formerly very important alternative global art movement, namely mail art. This form was decisive for the beginnings of Dan and Lia’s activity as artists during the totalitarian communist regime when Romanian citizens were isolated, and it was impossible to travel. Back then, the only way to exhibit outside of Romania was to send art by mail. The mail art movement was based on this simple (and hence independent) form of communication and exhibition production. When Dan once officially applied to acquire a passport to travel to former Yugoslavia to participate in an art event in the 1980s, it resulted in the Secret Police Securitate blackmailing him to work for them as an informer, which he refused to do. At that time every sixth citizen in Romania “worked” for the Securitate, which created a horrifying state of fear, surveillance and violence.

The practice of sending a piece of paper per postal mail has become redundant in our digital communication age, but Dan keeps practicing it. He has also been collecting postcards as material for his installations. Besides Postcards to Lia, Dan presents few more series:
Who is the Guy in the Picture (2000 - ongoing);
Back Stories (Back of the Postcards) (2000 - ongoing);
Virus (2020); as well as the series
Politics, Freedom, Poorness (2000 - ongoing).

Postcards to Lia mainly make use of the back side. The same goes for Back stories (Back of the Postcards), where he looks at the fading representations of diverse cities. In other series, he utilizes the front side, for instance he draws over, as in Virus, which results in a collection of places “attacked” by the virus, creating an absurd memory of the times when traveling was completely challenged and many people stayed at home for long periods of time. Sometimes, he doesn’t intervene in the image, but lets the contrast of the places speak for itself, for instance in Politics, Freedom, Poorness. Here we see iconic photographs of cities marked by monuments of freedom alongside postcards with photographs of informal settlements and slums. Finally, Dan produced an art work specifically for this exhibition, a Limited Edition art work in the form of a postcard that he plans to send via post to those who would like to have one.

Two banners are included in the show (and the public space), which were produced during the Documenta 15 to formulate a critique against the war in Ukraine. Finally, Dan’s drawings with white chalk temporarily fill the black walls of the smaller room at Kunstraum Innsbruck.

Despite their differences in medium and approach, both Dan’s and Lia’s works are quite fragile and many of their art projects have ephemeral character, and disappear after the show. They often use modest means of production as a result of them taking a critical distance from traditional art and the contemporary art market, but also as a strategy to remain mobile in the context of past censorship and current capitalist “peripheral” location.

LIA PERJOVSCHI
presents an installation Colors-A Deconstructed Painting that analyze painting as a medium and as a tool of representation. Her most recent small-format paintings, drawings and collages appropriate images — mostly from social media — along with several objects, which are the elements she uses in her deconstructions. Lia intertwines these works and her reflections on color with her earlier works and her concerns about society and politics.

Trained as a painter who was forced to paint realistically during her studies at the art academy, her artistic path has been invested in resisting this oppressive approach. Her early art was very much focused on physical performance, processing experiences of a society of fear incapable of resistance, state violence, failed revolution and democracy, the transition to capitalism and the effects of these regimes on bodies, genders, identities, and autonomy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lia’s performances sometimes included her two- dimensional sculptures of textiles in the form of shadows, which represent a double body in different states. Some of these sculptures, especially Shadows, are characteristic of her artistic oeuvre. She also repeatedly returns to them, remaking and restaging them (as in the case of this exhibition). Hence, her explorations into images and painting also includes interrogating sculpture and other media, as well as raising questions about art and its role in society in general.

After a long period of working with different media for several decades, Lia returned to painting during the pandemic, and began working on a new series of Colors-A Deconstructed Painting (2020-2022). Her interest in psychology, in the meaning and effect of colors merges here with her analysis of the world around her, which she zooms in and out of. These explorations include her reflections on the colors of the past and today, about which she says “30 years I was living in black and white communist time. Another 30 years I live in the colorful neo-liberal hypnotic time and now we have the war in Ukraine.” Even when her installation creates a narrative that shifts from color to black-and-white scales, and references the past and the present, she concludes her research on color by saying that it shows that “all colors have both negative and positive effects. Colors do not exist; they are invention of our brain. So, even though we are actually in a universe without colors, we are equipped to see them, and we have a possibility to be creative with them and think of how we all create the society in which we live.” (Lia Perjovschi)

In her projects, Lia envisions art as knowledge-sharing and as creative practice for social change. She seeks to question the physical phenomenon of seeing, the mental process of seeing, and seeing as a consequence of ideology and as a crisis of humanity. She interrogates the color, the image how it is formed, and what of the image stays in our memory. She explores this using text, figuration, and abstraction within the medium of painting; in doing so, she departs from the “real” and the digital realm of information, and enters into the realm of the metaphoric. Abstract paintings, paintings that reconfigure pixels, figurative paintings, and samples of color schemes follow in a row. She creates a calm and welcoming space that is suddenly disrupted by disturbing images and texts derived from various armed conflicts. One image contains the text: “As a child I never imagined that all of the real monsters in the world would be humans.” Photographs of destruction, of children abused as “solders”, and of their suffering in wartime, bring the artistic formalist, technical and psychological reflections on color into the political realm. Juxtaposed images of war aggressors create an interrogation of the image and war politics that spans the 20th and 21st century, protesting war politics in general, and the current war in Ukraine, with an urgent appeal to find a solution. What started as Lia’s meditation on color—as her way to enhance creativity and find an artistic strategy to deal with crisis during the pandemic—turns into black-and-white or gray-scale images of war horrors. In addition to these human catastrophes, she includes images of natural catastrophes that interrupt the discourse of human exceptionalism and test solidarity. A pair of VR glasses that is part of Colors-A Deconstructed Painting questions the virtual promise.

The painting entitled Hands, Study on The Blind (2020) is a study of hands, similar to ways hands are studied by students at the Art Academy. Here, however, she merges the movements of the hands, which reveal much about a human’s character, with studies of children, thereby again raising questions of responsibility and accountability (of us adults).

In her remakes of Shadows (1990, 1992, 1993, 2018, 2022), a series of works in the form of silhouettes made from thin textile, Lia reflects on questions of past and present, and on possibilities of transformation. Shadows hang in the space and create mixed feelings. They look like exhausted bodies and minds, empty of life, maybe even ghosts. Or, they could be a “wardrobe” of different identities, implying that we have the option and privilege to decide what we will become in this world (even when we are haunted by shadows past and present). Accompanying the Shadows are two of Lia’s earlier performances on body and playfulness. Loop (1997) was shot on the roof of Lia’s and Dan’s apartment building in Bucharest and takes on the form of a video performance (Lia performs for the camera, not for the audience). We see only her silhouette, as she is a shadow throughout. Before the backdrop of Bucharest’s concrete residential block, she jumps up and down as if she were on hold, “running in circles”, or training patience. In the second performance Approach (1997 Tel Aviv, Israel; 2002 Cetinje, Montenegro), she literally performs a “shadow” that sneaks into everyday situations, following and copying movements and gestures of passers-by, crossing the border of conventional boundaries of distance within public space. The familiar childhood game is performed by the artist and unknown passers-by, creating a very funny intervention that breaks with the routines of daily life and creates a kind “candid camera” video of contemporary art.

Finally, Fragments of Humanity also includes a few of Lia’s earlier works, such as Climate Change Kit (2010) that entails a raincoat, rucksack, flashlight, whistle, water bottle etc. Her installation, the T-Shirts project (2009) includes prints of quotes she has collected, for instance, about human culture in general and its relative place in the universe; an explanation of the word queer; and a timeline of protests.

About the artists

DAN AND LIA PERJOVSCHI
have showed their own artistic works in hundreds of exhibitions and festivals in Romania and internationally. On some occasions they have had the chance to exhibit together, and this show is their second exhibition together at Kunstraum Innsbruck. In 2006, they presented their projects independently in two separate rooms (curated by Stefan Bidner). This time their show is dialogical.

For over thirty years DAN PERJOVSCHI
has been commenting on what is happening around us through drawings. He developed his own unmistakable reduced visual language that condenses intricate topics without taking away the complexity of reality. As an artist and journalist, Dan Perjovschi’s art practice developed as a kind of “visual journalism.” Since the early 1990s he has been working as an editor and contributor of once dissident, independent media called Weekly Revista 22. His drawings have not only been shown at art institutions, such as MOMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London, it has also been presented at festivals like the Venice Biennale and Documenta, as well as in public space and in social media. For over ten years he has been working on the “Horizontal Newspaper”, a 30-metre long public wall in Sibiu.

LIA PERJOVSCHI
is the founder and coordinator of CAA CAA (Contemporary Art Archive and Centre for Art Analysis), an organic work-in-progress project (with various names since 1985) and KM (Knowledge Museum), an interdisciplinary research project (since 1999). Her activities can be summarized as a journey from her physical body to the universal body of knowledge, and has been presented in more than 700 exhibitions, lectures and workshops around the world (most recently at Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg; KV Bielefeld 2021; Muzeum Susch, Switzerland 2020; BOZAR, Brussels; ARCO Madrid 2019; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA; Ivan Gallery Frieze NY 2018; Royal College of Art London; Ivan Gallery / Frieze NY , Arco Madrid; CAM Guandong Guangzsou China, AM Zheijiang Hangzhiou China 2017; Zurich University; Kunsthaus Hamburg; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; University Museum Manila Philippine 2016). While her artistic practice comprises various media, Lia Perjovschi has also been concerned with producing opportunities for intellectual exchange.

Text: Ivana MarjanovićSources:

Interviews by Ivana Marjanović and e-mail exchange with Dan and Lia Perjovschi, 2022-2023 (all quotations).
David Crowley, Behind the Line. The Art of Dan and Lia Perjovschi, University ofPlymouth Press, 2012.
Kristine Stiles, States of Mind, Dan and Lia Perjovschi, Duke University Press, 2007.
Kristine Stiles, amaLIA perjovschi, 1996.

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION

OPENING
12.05.23, 18:00
FRAGMENTS OF HUMANITY
with Dan & Lia Perjovschi

ARTISTS TALK
13.05.23, 12:00
OPEN PLACE
with Yuriy Kruchak & Yulia Kostereva

OPEN SEMINAR
15.06.23, 11:30
BIOGRAFIE UND SUBJEKT IN DER (POST-)MIGRATIONSGESELLSCHAFT
with Dr.in Sarah Hegenbart