Dan Perjovschi

(1961, RO)

Romania, 1993, Timişoara
Removing Romania, 2003, Kassel
Wall installation with video (b/w, color) and letter
Courtesy: The Artist and Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin.

The feeling of fear and frustration in Perjovschi’s earlier work reached a climax in the years following 1990, when in Romania everything that had been silenced for such a long time came to surface. Under this impression he carried out in 1993 at the Zone Performance Festival in Timişoara his “anti-performance” (Perjovschi) Romania, in which he tattooed the country’s name on his shoulder. Ten years later in the context of René Block’s show In den Schluchten des Balkans (In the Gorges of the Balkan), he decided to remove the tattoo. The surgical procedure of the new work entitled Removing Romania consisted of laser bombardment of the tattoo, each black dot splitting into millions of pieces and each of the pieces carried away through his skin by molecules. Perjovschi’s idea was that the tattoo would not be erased but instead spread throughout his whole body.