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Lia Perjovschi - Survival Kit

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Site specific installation, selection from ongoing project„Knowledge Museum“, made by renowned contemporary Romanian artist.

Lia Perjovschi (*1961) is one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary Romanian art. Her conceptually focused works have been part of a number of international exhibitions in important world galleries and museums. She expresses herself through various media, but the focus of her work is primarily drawing and written text combined with collage.

Since 1999, Lia Perjovschi has been working on the interdisciplinary project Knowledge Museum. It is an extensive, constantly supplemented and updated archive of texts, images and objects, which is a multi-layered interpretation of the complexity of human society and the challenges it faces. The Knowledge Museum is gradually presented in a series of exhibitions around the world. The author's plan is to gradually transform this archive, physically stored today in a studio in the Romanian city of Sibiu, into an institution.

Generally speaking, Perjovschi's work is a unique attempt to visualize or materialize the processes of thinking, learning, gathering information, sorting it and operating it in different contexts. The result is a collage depicting the current state of civilization, with a tremendous historical intellectual heritage, but also with all the risks brought about by global modernization and industrialization in particular.

A characteristic form that repeatedly appears in the work of the Romanian author is the "mind map", a tool primarily developed by psychologists in order to streamline creative processes. Other frequent elements appearing in Perjovschi's exhibitions and presentations are conceptual diagrams, timelines, tables, charts and other tools for visualizing data and social phenomena and processes. All this is complemented by educationally oriented video projections and small "banal" objects installed in the space from the ever-growing collection of museum souvenirs from all over the world. In poetic metaphors, these objects refer to physics, astronomy, geology, ecology, ethnology, politics, media, militarism... Lia Perjovschi's installations are created as a site-specific reaction of the author to a specific exhibition space - the same is the case in Galerie NTK as part of the exhibition Survival kit. The entire exhibition can be seen as one huge mind map, an organically growing representation of the author's thinking process about the world of which she is a part.

During the twenty-five years of its existence, the Knowledge Museum project, through a natural development and from a rather analytical approach, has gradually, following emerging ecological, economic, health and safety problems, turned into engaged project, as the name of the exhibition "Survival Kit" suggests). The accumulation of crisis situations across the fields of human activity has led contemporary scientists and politicians to increasingly use a new "fashionable" term: "polycrisis" - defined as "a collective designation of simultaneous interconnected crises afflicting the planet and human society." Lia Perjovschi perceives her Prague exhibition as a sincere attempt to create a "manual for successful survival" in the environment of such a severely tested human civilization. The artist sees hope for a solution primarily in education and information sharing.