Photos by Laurentiu Garofeanu
Gallery Yujiro, supported by Romanian Cultural Institute London, presents the first UK solo exhibition of the internationally acclaimed Romanian artist Lia Perjovschi. Her multi-disciplinary practice recovers, collects, and disseminates information which has been inaccessible to Romania until 1989. A highly developed personal archive is formed through objects, diagrams, texts, images, and film.
For roughly twenty years, Lia embarks on a project-as-an-institution employing the recent history of art, as material for building up relations and dialogue. "Her works are neither installations nor performances; they look like offices for individual research, reading rooms or places for debates. The focus is the body of art. She cares less if one calls it art or not." The CAA (Contemporary Art Archive) is a "context in motion" a "museum in files". Based on 15 years of meticulous documentation of the international art scene, CAA has the mission to enlarge the Romanian contemporary art scene, to preserve independent positions and empower promising institutions and individuals.
"Chronology" concentrates on Lia's "Subjective Art History", an extensive series of reproduced images and text dating from Modernism to the present day. The piece is made up of three interconnected stems: "Timeline general", "Timeline on Romanian culture" and "My timeline" edited and re-edited over the last fifteen years through an investigative practice, whose purpose is to examine what, how, and ultimately who enters into the archive of history. Ideas and notes take on the form of snowflake like, crystalline diagrams, comprising of fifty drawings in different languages mapping the connections in history, history of art, theory, politics and language.
As a result of Lia's travels, a collection of information from galleries and institutions is accumulated. The "postcard collection" and "plastic bags collection" dating from 1990 to the present are exhibiting in conjunction with the "detective table", which consists of models, replicas of art works bagged and tagged, as if a form of criminal investigation in progress. Lia writes and produces a newspaper entitled CAA/CAA publications, which, disseminating news about the progress of the archive, future projects, interviews and text, will be exhibited for the first time.
The catalogue titled "Chronology" is available from Galley Yujiro. The list of events is available here.
Dates:Opening: 1st December 2006Exhibition ends: 31st January 2007
Gallery Yujiro Studio Unit A502 Tower Point Tower Bridge Business Complex 100 Clements Road London SE16 4DG Tel: +44 (0) 20 7394 8591 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7394 8610
