DURHAM, N.C.- The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University will present the first retrospective of the work of Romanian artists Dan and Lia Perjovschi from Aug. 23, 2007, through Jan. 6, 2008. “States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi” includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, installations and conceptual art from 1980 to the present, as well as newly commissioned works.

The show comes 10 years after Duke hosted the Perjovschis’ first two-person exhibition in the United States. Also in 1997, the Perjovschis taught for a semester in Duke’s Department of Art and Art History. This summer, Dan Perjovschi’s first solo show in the United States is taking place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he created large-scale drawings covering a wall of MoMA’s central atrium, part of the “Projects” series. At the Nasher Museum, he will create drawings on the exterior windows during the week of August 20.

“Dan and Lia are exciting artists whose work is complex, both artistically and intellectually -- but also broadly engaging,” said Kimerly Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum. “I am thrilled that the Nasher Museum is presenting an in-depth look at their work. The timing is perfect, coinciding with public excitement over Dan’s recent commission in New York.”
Dan and Lia Perjovschi were both born in 1961 in Sibiu, Romania, and were educated in the Romanian socialist system. Both artists belong to the first avant-garde generation following the 1989 Romanian Revolution.

Dan Perjovschi is known for humorous large-scale drawing installations commenting on current events, cultural paradoxes and art world institutions and practices. He is the foremost artist of satirical political drawing in Romania. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe, with recent shows at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2005), Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2006) and a project at the Tate Modern in London (2006). In 1999, he represented Romania at the 48th Venice Biennale.

Lia Perjovschi’s international reputation emerged from her performances between 1988 and 2005. Today she works as a conceptual artist analyzing cultural and historical formations through “Contemporary Art Archive Center for Art Analysis,” an archive she created that is devoted to the scrutiny of the production of aesthetic and social forms of knowledge. Under the rubric of this archive, Lia performs conceptual/pedagogical actions in “workshops,” a mode of art-making related to public education at the nexus of art practice, art institutions and the construction and analysis of history.

“States of Mind” is curated by Kristine Stiles, a professor of contemporary art in Duke’s Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Stiles is the foremost scholar on the Perjovschis’ work and has been writing about them since 1992. She is also recognized for her scholarship on performance art, as well as destruction, violence and trauma in art. She earned J. William Fulbright fellowship to Romania and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship for her work on documentary photography of the nuclear age. She has published, taught and lectured internationally on “cultures of trauma,” a term she coined in 1993 to theorize visual representations of trauma in society, particularly in Romania; and she regularly teaches a course on “Representations of Trauma in Art, Literature and Film” that she first taught in 1995 at the University of Bucharest in Romania.

“States of Mind” will be complemented by programs at the Nasher Museum that include appearances by the artists, a preview party for museum members and the Duke community on August 29, a Family Day event, teacher workshop and other educational and public programming.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 150-page color catalogue distributed by Duke University Press. It is edited by Stiles and includes essays by Stiles, as well as Romanian-American poet and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu and Marius Babias, Romanian political scientist, cultural theorist, curator and winner of the Carl Einstein Prize for Art Criticism in Germany in 1996. The book includes interviews by Roxana Marcoci, Romanian-American curator at MoMA, and by Stiles.

This exhibition and related programs received support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and Duke’s Office of the President and Office of the Provost.