Dan Perjovschi: Embodying History
Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025, Corneliu Miklosi Museum, Timișoara, September 3 – October 26, 2025.
Dan Perjovschi’s work is almost synonymous with Romania’s social and political transformations during post-socialism, which the artist has followed relentlessly. For more than thirty years Perjovschi has presented his poignant visual commentaries on urgent political topics. His works involve drawing for grueling hours and days on interior walls, building facades, floors, and windows, a process that can be interpreted as restrained performative gestures requiring the physical presence of the artist’s body. This practice has evolved into a personal, easily recognizable style that requires the presence of the artist at the exhibition site; he rarely exhibits drawings on paper or clothing and never delegates their execution via instructions, instead emphasizing a relation between art and society that must be performed to be meaningful. Distilled into ironic and sometimes sarcastic conceptual images, these works have populated exhibition spaces across the world—including mammoth institutions like Documenta, Manifesta, MoMA, the Tate Modern, the Venice Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou. But they have appeared less in Romania, where Perjovschi preferred smaller group shows and had no major solo exhibition in a national art museum, an institution that he relentlessly criticized as being authoritarian and insufficiently reformed.
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
With the exception of Perjovschi’s trademark large-scale drawings, executed on the only continuous vertical wall running along one side of the building, most of the exhibition space in Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025 was deliberately left open. This openness enabled a predominantly horizontal display of smaller clusters of paper-based conceptual works, alongside the installation of educational areas, including a reading space, a library and an extensive archive of the magazine ”22”. The decision not to compartmentalize the space with partition walls rendered the entire exhibition visible at a single glance, evoking the aesthetics of co-working and shared spaces adopted by many contemporary art institutions and creative-industry hubs alike.
In an institutional landscape increasingly shaped by star curators and ever more theoretical curatorial statements, this exhibition functioned largely as a self-curated conceptual project. Conceived by the artist in dialogue with curator Dana Sarmeș, it delegated parts of the archival material—comprising photographic and limited video documentation of actions, as well as diverse textual interventions ranging from newspaper works to protest slogans—to a group of guest curators (Simona Constantin, Monica Dănilă, Magda Radu, and Mihaela Tilincă).
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
These curators selected, organized, and presented distinct facets of Perjovschi’s practice in four smaller rooms adjacent to the main hall, situated opposite the monumental exhibition wall. This wall—featuring Perjovschi’s signature white-marker drawings on a dark grey background—remained a work in progress throughout the exhibition, continuously executed by the artist over its entire duration. The thematically organized rooms focused respectively on performativity (from the late 1980s to the late 2000s); social activism, protest, and civic engagement; printed matter (including artist books, fanzines, postcards, book covers, and newspaper inserts); and educational practices centered on the open archive and open studio the artist co-founded with Lia Perjovschi.
The choice to assist and intervene in the selection and installation of the works presented in most of this retrospective exhibition derives from his own peculiar work methodology, which reinvented drawing as a medium. Tackling topics such as the uneven process of globalization, post-socialist memory, European expansion and identity, and political turmoil, his deceptively simple temporary drawings disturb and reinterpret political discourses amplified by mass media, laying bare the ideology within them for the “common people.” Their flexibility and cultural relevance are nothing less than remarkable. Guided by profound skepticism and astute observation, he negotiated between the curatorial and the wider social and institutional contexts of the exhibition, the various potential perspectives of international and local visitors, and his own historically situated cultural perspective. The latter has changed several times throughout the years according to the different frameworks used to construct geohistorical subject positions, as Perjovschi noted: “In 1995 I was exhibiting in East Central European shows, at the end of the 1990s in East European shows, at the beginning of 2000 in South East European shows and, subsequently in Balkan shows. Yet I have never moved from Bucharest.”(Roxana Marcoci, “What Happened to Us? Interview with Dan Perjovschi,” in States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2007), 167.)
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
His drawings are by no means simple jokes, but strategies for marking space and time —although Perjovschi captures well the irony, irreverence, and humor that László Beke considered, for good reason, to represent the hallmark of conceptualism in Eastern Europe. Humor is a subversive and empowering critical strategy: it is always elusive and mobile, it avoids essentializations, and it defies the rhetorics of power.
The more one lingers in the exhibition, the more it becomes obvious that Dan Perjovschi is, first and foremost, a conceptual artist belonging to the now-endangered lineage of social criticism. This lineage ran like an underground stream throughout experimental art in Central and Eastern Europe and the first two post-socialist decades, keeping alive the historical avant-garde’s unease with cultural conventions and social organization manifested at the beginning of the twentieth century. Perjovschi shares with many of his Eastern European contemporaries a heightened sensitivity to accelerated social transformations and a readiness to confront abuses of power in their various forms—an ethical stance that the rapid expansion of market-oriented galleries and the growing authority of increasingly wealthy art centers and museums in Romania tends to silence or marginalize. In keeping with the logic of a retrospective gaze, his well-known drawings are therefore arranged in chronological order. They present subjective analyses of key moments in the history of Romania after 1989 that the artist witnessed: the early years of post-communism and the hope for a better, democratic world, followed by integration into NATO and the EU during the subsequent decade. These are connected with key events in world history: 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, the 2008 economic crisis (which hit Romania in 2010), the rise of Trump and MAGA, and the recent war in Ukraine. Several works relying solely on textual wordplay, such as Make aMErica Great Again, acquire heightened relevance today, operating across national borders and addressing global political imaginaries.
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
The drawings relentlessly critique political demagogy, endemic corruption, the uneven distribution of wealth under globalization, and the inflated political expectations that characterized Romania’s so-called “happy 1990s.” Recurring motifs—empty pockets, the redistribution of debt rather than wealth, the infiltration of public life by secret services (signaled through the acronym “SR!”), and the narrowing of social and political vision under conservative religious influence—condense these critiques into stark, immediately legible images.
At first sight, due to their power to conceptually distill complex political matters into simple facts aiming at formulating inconvenient truths, Perjovschi’s drawings recall not only today’s memetic vocabulary—so dear to new generations consuming digital content indiscriminately (as a younger exhibition visitor remarked in a private conversation)—but also the simplicity of a particular type of comic drawing: the caricature. The latter ties Perjovschi’s work not only to the expanded field of graphic arts—highlighted by his use of paper-based supports such as postcards and newspaper clippings—but also to the vocabulary of urban art, guerrilla interventions, and graffiti. These are all strategies meant to reclaim public space and contest the distribution of power through officially approved symbols and images. On the other hand, one could say that Perjovschi has practiced a type of aesthetic journalism—defined by Alfredo Cramerotti as involving “artistic practices in the form of investigation of social, cultural or political circumstances”(Alfredo Cramerotti, Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), 21.) used in a critical way, meant “to expose the limitations of photojournalism, documentation and the ethics of representation.”(Cramerotti, Aesthetic Journalism, 37.)
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
Supporting this perspective, the artist’s ongoing drawings for the weekly magazine 22 (named after December 22, 1989, the date when Ceaușescu lost power during the Romanian Revolution), where Perjovschi has collaborated for thirty-five years, are exhibited in the space as an archive on a long table, becoming another backbone of the exhibition. His early drawings in the magazine may be seen as the starting point for the expansion of journalism into the art space and, conversely, his infusion of critical reflection on urgent present-day matters (rendering him a “time-specific artist”) in order to undo artistic representations as “ideological apparatuses” (according to a loose Althusserian understanding of the term). Since 2010, Perjovschi has also initiated in Sibiu (the city where he chose to settle) a continuous, ongoing public space art project entitled the Horizontal Newspaper, where he regularly exhibits his commentaries on current events on a wall situated near the historic center. Both projects testify to Perjovschi’s ongoing interest in journalism, which he makes clear in a statement included in a wall text in the exhibition: “I am an artist. But I am also a citizen. And a journalist.”
Through this triple positioning (artist, journalist and citizen), Perjovschi’s drawings (whether mural or printed matter) and annotated interventions on selected photographs or postcards—such as those exhibited in the space as early, rarely seen, unfinished, or simply discarded artistic projects—are also a symptom of a didactic impulse. As he claims in the exhibition statement (which is written as a manifesto): “For me art is fundamentally political. My role is not aesthetic, but social.” The loose formal similarity between the exhibition wall and Joseph Beuys’s famous didactic blackboards is by no means coincidental. Indeed, for more than thirty years, Perjovschi acted, together with Lia Perjovschi, as an educator for younger generations of Romanian artists. They empowered many of them, supporting artistic NGOs and networks of art spaces (such as Tranzit) with a critical, emancipatory social discourse. While his stance was always oriented against communism (which he perceived not in its ideal form, but rather in the way it was implemented through the oligarchic dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu), he also fought against provincialism, conservative cultural policies, aestheticism, formalism, and the co-optation of art by a market that turns it into an easily digestible commercial product. The latter becomes conspicuous in the way he explains giving up performance art “when it turned into a spectacle” in the exhibition statement.
Documentation of Perjovschi’s performative works was arranged chronologically by Magda Radu in a smaller room adjoining the vast, intimidating main hall. This part of his oeuvre is likely the most widely recognized by curators and art historians, stemming from the way they closely track traumatic episodes in Romania’s post-socialist history. These works range from early symbolic gestures staged in the late 1980s in Oradea, responding to isolation and an oppressive social climate, to the 2007 temporary performative monument Monument (History/Histery). The latter revisits the infamous 1990 miners’ revolt as an open, unhealed wound, embodied through the silent, sustained presence of two performers impersonating a miner and a student.(In 1990, miners (responding to a call by President Ion Iliescu to “defend democracy”) violently repressed the peaceful civic protests led by intellectuals and students in University Square in Bucharest, who claimed that former communist activists and agents of the Securitate should be banned from public positions in the new political regime.) Perhaps the most remarkable performance—one that also lends its title to the exhibition—remains the tattooing of the word “Romania” onto the artist’s arm during the Zona Performance Festival in Timișoara in 1993, at a moment when Perjovschi was only beginning to gain international visibility. This act literalized the burden of the country’s socialist past and its unsettled historical present. The tattoo, which Perjovschi removed a decade later,(The tattoo was removed on the occasion of the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans curated by René Block at Friedericianum, Kassel in 2003.) marked a turning point: a moment when he no longer perceived himself as exclusively bound to a national identity, but rather as a citizen of the cosmopolis. The work is unusual both for its extended duration—ten years during which the artist silently carried it on his body—and for its symptomatic relevance to Perjovschi’s critical engagement with nationalist frameworks of interpretation.
Installation view of Dan Perjovschi. Romania: A Retrospective 1985–2025. Photograph by Tudor Pătrașcu. Courtesy of Dan Perjovschi.
Viewed through the extensive documentation assembled in the exhibition, Dan Perjovschi’s protean presence in Romanian art after 1989 proves difficult to circumscribe. Its force resides perhaps in its relentless activism, which combines an intransigent ethical stance with immediate reaction and the flexibility to adapt to various means of public communication. Like a surgeon, Perjovschi seeks to repair damaged social tissue not by suturing it, but by exposing its fault lines, confronting and excising empty political rhetoric. In doing so, he intervenes directly in the communicative fabric through which the public sphere is constituted, preserving its fundamental agonism. His work generates dissensus—and thus resists the accumulation of power under any regime, a condition that historically precedes totalitarianism—rather than aspiring to the rational consensus negotiated by educated elites, as envisioned in Habermasian models of deliberation.(For dissensus as opposed to the dialogical public sphere see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).) Yet Perjovschi does not merely interpret or comment on history. The tattoo bearing the word “Romania” may no longer be visible, but, as the artist himself has noted, it never truly disappeared: it was absorbed and metabolized by his body. In this sense, the retrospective presents Perjovschi as a living archive of post-socialism, one that preserves memory through continuous critical engagement.
This positioning acquires renewed urgency in the current political climate, where democracy appears not only threatened on an unprecedented scale, but increasingly dependent on individual acts of courage. This retrospective look at Perjovschi’s career recalls the willingness to stand up and “perform the truth,” as Michel Foucault once proposed.(Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).) The artist’s practice exemplifies such parrhesiastic gestures, mocking power in its local manifestations and demystifying the false narratives sustained by news conglomerates and social media alike.
