Lia Perjovschi: Knowledge and Context

The Parkour series introduces themes, concepts and seminal encounters for the activity of outstanding artists in the field of visual and performative arts in Romania, which enabled them to produce an unparalleled body of work.

The series looks at a limited array of artistic projects and experiences, through the use of interview as an unmediated recording instrument. The interview format accommodates the reader with the particular spatial and material conditions of their practice, with the personal beliefs and the ongoing process of conceptualising their work. Parkour thereby distill significant aspects of the recent cultural history, bringing back to the fore the role of memory in capturing the kernel of an artistic time, of an artwork, of a conceptual turn. 

Lia Perjovschi, born in 1961 in Sibiu, is the founder and coordinator of CAA/CAA—the Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis, an infor -mal institution functioning under different names since 1985, and of KM—the Knowledge Museum, an interdisciplinary and educational project based on the research started by the artist in 1999 and continuing until today.
Her activities and works—“International Archive for Contemporary Art 1990–today,” “The Center For Art Analysis 1999–today,” “Timeline 1997–today,” “Diagrams/Mind Maps 1999–today” and the “Knowledge Museum Project 1999–today”—define a series of registers in working with information, in organising the various materials collected and archived and in producing a visual representation of the basic knowledge.
The journey of her artistic practice from her body (the performances of the 1980s–1990s) to the body of knowledge (CAA/CAA, KM) opens up a personal storyboard—a space of postproduction and dialogue, of rethinking, recycling information and structuring ideas.

Publication concept and editors: Alina Şerban & Ştefania Ferchedău
Proofreading: Cristina Ştefan
Translation: Claudia Lie, Laura Ionică
Design: Radu Manelici
Image processing: Aurelian Ardeleanu

Institute of the Present, 2017
English, Romanian 
Softcover
156mm x 229mm