ART for The World presents
Booth D21
Dan Perjovschi
work to be done in-situ at ArtGenève
Born in 1961 in Sibiu, Romania. Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania.
Although Dan Perjovschi trained to be a painter (at the George Enescu University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania), his work has since the early 1990s developed into a prolific drawing practice, focusing in particular on satirical drawing. By reducing his medium to its most elementary expression – the clear line – Perjovschi endows his sketches with maximum legibility, which as a result brings his drawings closer to the act of writing. The notions of drawing and writing are, indeed, inseparable in the artist’s work. But if clarity, spontaneity, and immediacy are so typical of his sketches, his finished drawings represent the most direct materialization of a thought.
Seeking more than to communicate something about the world rather than simply to aestheticize it, Perjovschi’s thoughts develop in response to current events that affect the artist’s immediate environment, such as the reconstruction of cultural identity in post-communist Romania, although inspiration can also come from topics in the international media.
Ultimately, Perjovschi’s art presents us with a gaze that is both ironic and acerbic. Unsparing toward the popular clichés circulating in the news media, he raises questions about politics, religion, the role of the individual in the collective, and the relationship of the global and the local. To expressions of violence and extremism, Perjovschi opposes laughter and mockery as the safeguards of free thought and the free expression of thought.
Perjovschi's works are primarily conceived to be ephemeral installations. His wall mural created in-situ on 23-25 January conceived expressly for ART for The World, will be destroyed at the close of the fair. Atypically, Perjovschi has incorporated original works on paper (signed and dated) into the wall mural, which are for sale individually or together as a series in support of ART for The World.
Pipilotti Rist
I Drink Your Bath Water, 2008
HD video, Color, 2 min. 32 sec
I Drink Your Bath Water was produced for ART for The World's film production Stories on Human Rights. The short film is an audiovisual poem: hairs are trees, skin is earth, wrinkles are paths and eyes shine like lakes. The film travels over the surface of a human body, mixed with images from nature in different scales. The human body is treated as a landscape. The director stresses that there is ultimately no difference between a human body and a plant. If humans would be more aware of this, our environment might be less subjected to pollution and abuse.
There is a belly lying under the desert/ The artery is the earthquake/ The wind is my voice/ The oil comes from deep inside/ I fly over the apple tree/ Innocent with a ton of apples in the stomach/ I will shit some oil/ And swim away through rotten plants/ I bath my trunk with the four limbs/ Then caress the earthworm/ Snow is covering the hill/ The hill is a bottom with sleeping trees/ With a sunset/ A sweet pepper from inside.
-Pipilotti Rist
Credits
Director: Pipilotti Rist
Cast: Ewelina Guzik
Music: Anders Guggisberg
Camera: Pierre Mennel, Verena Schoch
Sound Design: Roland Widmer, Rainer Flury, Zentralton Zürich
Editing & Technique: Davide Legittimio
Miniatures & Landscape: Kathy Müller Moser
Executive Producers: Plan B HC Vogel, Christ Niemeyer
Producer: Hugofilm, Christof Neracher
Thanks to: Lukas Gähwiler, Nici Jost, Rachele Giudici, Tamara Rist, Anna Rist, Chrigi Eser, Famille Hess, Balz Roth & Yuji Rist
Pipilotti Rist is a Zürich based Swiss artist, born in 1962, who is internationally recognized as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her work is often mesmerizing, vibrantly colored and a fusion of the natural world and technological sublime. According to Rist, the mission of art is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices.
Gal Weinstein
Lighthouse, 2012
Gal Weinstein’s works can be distinguished by the artist’s great skill and the use of heterogeneous materials, from wood to porcelain, from wax to polystyrene and steel filaments.
It is precisely the simplicity of the materials from which the work is made contrasts with the significance of the themes and the images selected and with the rigor discernible in the design and realization. The discrepancy gives rise, in Weinstein’s work, to short-circuits of meaning and raises questions about the relations that can exist ‘between interpretation and experience, between expression and opinion’. Only by dealing with the complexity of the present and taking responsibility for the problems, the uncertainties, the diverging expectations and the dilemmas that society presents to each one of us is it possible, according to Gal Weinstein, to avoid cultural catastrophe.
The picture itself is made of wool fibre and steel wool. From a distance it doesn’t disclose the materials that it is made of. From close up the image falls apart and the materialism that it is made of, becomes ever more present. Meaning physical closeness to the work reveals the physicality of the picture and on the other hand breaks down the image – revealing and blurring at the same time.
Weinstein was born in 1970 in Ramat Gan. He lives and works in Tel Aviv. He has been selected to represent National Pavilion of Israel at the Biennale di Venezia, 2017.
image: Gal Weinstein, Lighthouse, 2012, steel wool and wool on plywood, 160 x 360 cm
