Lia and Dan Perjovschi

.. in Bucharest are probably the first and most determined to defy the existing institutional framework by opening their own atelier for those interested in alternative culture as well as for young artists on the hunt for information. As early as the dawn of the ’90s Lia and Dan Perjovschi founded the Contempory Art Archive, a collection of issues, publications and reproductions. By the end of the ’90s the CAA became a valuable database for all alternative art initiatives, a self-supporting archive created outside the network of state funds or self-government support. Besides issuing, on bases of archive material, publications of cheap design meant to inform upon and to classify various tendencies and thus also managing to create sort of a virtual art scene, the CAA organized several exhibitions paired with open discussions or series of lectures. Beginning with the year 2003 the CAA has modified its function and is currently operating under the title of Center For Art Analysis. The latest publication of the Center was issued for the 6th Periferic Biennial in Iasi and it contains a series of interviews taken from various intellectuals on the topic of how do they contrive of their everyday life, how do they relate to the contexts they live in and of their ideas on how the future will appear to them, the publication managing thus to reflect the current state of spiritual life in Romania. (Normalcy, Meaning, Relaxation)

Lia Perjovschi is co-coordinating her archive for a lot of years already, and in all this time it served her to understand, to analyse, to question contemporary art, and it served others, a lot of people, from artists, art critics, sociologists, philosophers, theologians, journalists, etc. etc. to become familiar with everything in contemporary art (from concepts to trends, from exhibitions to their public), and, more importantly, to know each other and to find out about people who eventually became their collaborators, and very often, their good friends.

“To teach means to perform” says Lia, emphasizing probably the most important thing about the archive, namely sharing. Still carrying the burden of the communist regime, when sharing (books, ideas, information) was practically forbidden and therefore a condition of survival, Lia discovers that a shared idea gives birth to another, that every project needs to be spread in order to “make sense”.

Perjovschi’s Drawings 

Dan Perjovschi’s figurative line drawings function as “public art”, providing visual witness to how heterogeneous population collectively grapples with a shared homogenous past in the reconstruction of the present-future. Perjovschi has actively engaged visual social commentaries for the purpose of producing political change, creating a public dialogue where the act of making anything public at still remains in question. His “social cartoon” address such issues as the relations between official culture and officially produced “alternative culture”; the spectator as (art) consumer, and individual responsibility regarding the social construction of meaning. For Perjovschi, drawing is a medium of circulation within society, linking precise observation of everyday life with ironic commentary and documenting the artist’s reactions to the demands of the context.