P74 Gallery ARCHIVE PAGE

20 September – 11 October 2011
P74 Gallery, Prušnikova 74, Ljubljana
Opening View: Tuesday, 20 September 2011 at 8 p.m.

Curator: Tadej Pogačar

After the show Hidden Histories of the OHO Group (2009) and the exhibition of work by the Novi Sad avant-garde collective Group 143 (2011), the P74 Center and Gallery is opening a new exhibition featuring important artistic production from the region: a retrospective of the performance work of Dan and Lia Perjovschi.

The creative work of Dan and Lia Perjovschi is closely tied to the medium of radical political performance, which they practiced in the 1980s and 1990s. Later, their performance work was transformed into educational projects (lectures and workshops) and performative drawing actions. The exhibition presents a video anthology that covers the period between 1987 and 2007.

Since the 1980s, Dan and Lia Perjovschi have been an extraordinary phenomenon in the development of experimental art in Eastern Europe. Both artists have dealt with many visual and performative media in their art practices: drawing, performance, installation, conceptual practice, mass media (especially television), and newspapers. Dan Perjovschi is a visual artist who combines drawing, comics, and graffiti in his artworks, which he produces directly on the walls of contemporary art museums and galleries around the world. His drawings are candid commentaries on current social and political topics. He became famous when he was chosen as an adviser to Romania’s first Ministry of Culture after the 1990 revolution, but he became popular thanks to his satirical drawings for Romania’s only opposition newspaper, Revista 22. Internationally, he established himself as a site-specific drawing artist, creating hundreds of images on floors, walls, and ceilings. His work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including Manifesta and the Venice Biennial (1999), as well as at Tate Modern, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and elsewhere.

The freedom of critical thinking is central to the practice of Lia Perjovschi, who collects and disseminates information. Her work is a personal alternative to the institutionalization of knowledge. Her history of events originates in notes and handwritten diagrams, which deal with history, theory, politics, and language. She calls these works Mind Maps. Her international reputation is connected with the performances she made in Eastern and Western Europe and Israel from 1988 to 2005. Today she works mainly as a conceptual and socially engaged artist, creating a newspaper, texts/maps, and similar projects related to her Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis (CAA/CAA). In the context of the CAA/CAA, Lia Perjovschi has transformed her performance practice into conceptual/educational actions and workshops concerned with the analysis and construction of history.

The performances of Dan and Lia Perjovschi are among the few works the two artists co-signed together. The Ljubljana exhibition at the P74 Center and Gallery represents the first retrospective overview of this art production.