Dan Perjovschi: www 2013

wall window workshop

  • © Rainer Schlautmann
    (c) Rainer Schlautmann
  • © Rainer Schlautmann
    (c) Rainer Schlautmann
  • © Rainer Schlautmann
    (c) Rainer Schlautmann
  • © Rainer Schlautmann
    (c) Rainer Schlautmann
  • © Rainer Schlautmann
    (c) Rainer Schlautmann

Dan Perjovschi is an itinerant worker in the visual arts, his platform: the walls, windows, and floors of museums and art galleries around the world, where he translates observations from politics, media, art, and everyday life to a mixture of line drawings and graffiti. As a commentary on a world of excess, he uses minimal means to engage a broad field of references. In so doing, his aesthetic of reticence has remained the same for years, large letters or stick figures in black and white. His tools are sketchbooks, markers, chalk, newspaper, and the Internet, which he uses to develop new ideograms and drawings and stage them as large social panoramas.

The roots of his art can be traced back to the social and political transformations of his home country Romania. After the end of the Ceausescu dictatorship 1989, Perjovschi began working as a political drawer for the cultural weekly Revista 22. Over the years, an extensive archive of motifs and scenes has developed that surface repeatedly in his exhibitions. Created as a rebellious art of survival, they now focus on the rituals and entanglements of a global society fixated on consumerism and material growth. His artworks are only planned for a limited time. When they disappear by being overpainted, they reveal what they are about: current affairs and the performance of an activist sense of humor. The ephemeral is what remains.

Despite his reputation in the international art world, Romania has remained the center of gravity in Dan Perjovschi’s thought. Besides his art, Dan Perjovschi sees it as an important task to search perspectives beyond authoritarian and anti-democratic ideologies, strengthening art’s role as a motor and driving force behind social processes. In the spring of this year, together with his wife, artist Lia Perjovschi, he was awarded the Princess Magriet Award of the European Cultural Foundation for his critical commitment.

Dan Perjovschi’s drawings provoke many questions. What has happened? Who is speaking? Where do the figures come from? In what society do they live? What struggles do they face? Are they our shadows? Or to repeat a question that became the title for his large-scale exhibition at New York’s MoMA: What Happened To Us? His installations around the world inspire the audience to think and draw. To rephrase the words of Joseph Beuys, when they see the markers and the chalk, almost everyone becomes a political drawer.

During the Ruhrtriennale, Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle will become a temporary open museum. Dan Perjovschi invites children, young people, and adults to complete his new installation www — wall window workshop 2013 with drawings and texts of their own, to comment on what they see or to draw over what’s already there. Step by step, new snapshots of the current state will have the interior space of art grown towards the public. During the opening week, workshops will take place. Dan Perjovschi will provide insights into the archive of his notebooks and encourage the audience to draw and to make art of their own.


Artistic direction —

Shows

Dates
— 23. August
Public Workshop - No Education
Announcement - no.education@ruhrtriennale.de Tel: +49 209 / 60 50 71 47
Entrance free

23 august to 6 october at the foyer of Jahrhunderthalle Bochum.

Project supporter

Kindly supported by the association of friends and sponsors of Ruhrtriennale.

August
  • Fri23Aug
    Foyer, ab 15.00
    Dan Perjovschi: www 2013 on 23. August 2013 at 3.00 PM

Recommendations

Ryoji Ikeda, Rimini Protokoll, Robert Wilson, Dan Perjovschi, Mischa Kuball
25. August 2013
Museum Folkwang, Essen