Exhibition - Dan Perjovschi Museum

The Art Department of the Mureş County Museum is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition Dan Perjovschi - Muzeu / Múzeum / Museum, which will take place on Friday, 31 May 2024, at 18.00, at the Palace of Culture in Târgu Mureş, in the presence of the artist.

Târgu Mureş Palace of Culture, 2nd floor - temporary exhibition hall
Visiting period: 31.05 - 14.07.2024
Opening: Friday, 31 May 2024, 18:00
Curator: Eliodor Moldovan

The unambiguous title leads us straight into the subject of Dan Perjovschi’s Târgu Mureș exhibition. A sharp commentator on social, cultural and political tensions and disruptions, Perjovschi takes up and amplifies a recurring theme of his art: the contemporary museum. Connected for over 30 years to the global network of major art museums, Dan Perjovschi could not ignore this first layer of his immediate reality in order to comment on, illustrate, question and sometimes directly criticize it.

The institution we all want to be “open to the public, accessible and inclusive, fostering diversity and sustainability” (excerpt from the latest I.C.O.M. definition of the museum, 2022) has often been, for many years and on many meridians, in various crises, increasingly subject to financial, political, ideological and other pressures, to which we add a series of indigenous deficiencies.

The book “Radical Museology” by British author Claire Bishop, illustrated by Dan Perjovschi with sharp drawings that comment on the international museum context, serves as reference point for the exhibition at the Palace of Culture. The exhibition is aimed at the Romanian and local museum scene alike, which are in obvious need of reinvention and adaptation. It is dedicated, above all, to the general public, to those who love this micro-universe which is meant to encapsulate “material and spiritual testimonies to the existence and evolution of human communities”.

Muzeu / Múzeum / Museum benefits from the generous contribution of several major European museums (where the artist has had projects) which have offered art publications and catalogues of their permanent or temporary reference exhibitions. These will be made available to the public in the exhibition.

Visitors are invited to leave their own contribution in terms of needs, understanding, criticism or empathy with the museum.

This is the first exhibition in a series called Museum in the Mirror which we are proposing in order to address (self-)critically the stasis and dynamics of the museum network.

Dan Perjovschi (b. 1961) lives and works in Bucharest and Sibiu. Between 1985 and 1990 he worked as a museographer at the Art Department of the Cris Country Museum in Oradea. In the first years after the fall of communism he worked at the Youth (and later Art) Department of the Ministry of Culture and organized the first international exhibitions of the young art scene. Since 1990 he has been collaborating with Revista 22 magazine, where he still works today. [“Even today the subject of my drawings is political, social and cultural. The same way 22 is structured”].

He began drawing “directly on architecture” in 1995 at Franklin Furnace in New York, and his first famous project was drawing on the floor of the pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale.
In 35 years he has had over a hundred solo and group exhibitions in modern and contemporary art museums around the world (Tate Modern, MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou, Ludwig Köln, MOT Tokyo, National Gallery Ljubljana etc.) and has participated in the most important art biennials (Venice, Sydney, Lyon, Sao Paolo, Jakarta, Off Biennale Budapest, Periferic Iasi, Art Encounters Timisoara etc.).
He is doing what he has always dreamed of doing, travelling the world and drawing it.
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The Mureş County Museum is funded by: Mureş County Council

Partners: Atrium Musei Association, Visit Mureş, Villa Vinea

With the support of: MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Kunstverein Hannover, Moderna galerija Ljubljana, WIELS | Contemporary Art Centre, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst - Aachen, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Van Abbe Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, PUNCH Bookshop Bucharest, Museum Ludwig - Köln, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Media partners: Zi de zi, Agerpres, Radio România Actualități, Propagarta, Modernism.ro, Evenimente muzeale, Duna TV, Erdély FM, Erdély TV, Gaga, Krónika, Kultúra, marosvasarhelyiek.ro, Marosvásárhelyi Rádió, Népújság, Punctul, Székelyhon, TVR.