Dan Perjovschi. The Horizontal Newspaper. A School of Text and Image

A look at Dan Perjovschi’s long-lasting artistic intervention in the public space in his hometown of Sibiu. Over 12 years of uninterrupted activity, the Horizontal Newspaper has connected its editions with different locations, from the theatre festival in Avignon to documenta fifteen in Kassel, questioning current events and proposing possibilities for a better future in a unique independent public art and, the book argues, educational project.

The Horizontal Newspaper is most probably the longest-lasting intervention in the public space in Romania and certainly a unique artistic experiment in the world. The work unfolds on a surface that is roughly 50 meters by four meters.

Ironically, the year when the National Theatre Bucharest destroyed Perjovschi’s At the Wall installation was coincidentally the year when he did the first intervention on the street-facing side of the wall. Therefore, the Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu cherished and celebrated what the National Theatre in Bucharest failed to appreciate.

The Horizontal Newspaper, the classroom with a single wall, neither discriminates nor closes its eyes to discrimination. Furthermore, as an artistic experiment, it refutes double standards. What Perjovschi delivers to his international audience through the Western art scenes, he also provides to the eyes of anyone who walks along the Coposu Boulevard in Sibiu city.

The Horizontal Newspaper has evolved into a “place in time” that neither spares us our biases nor allows us to sink in despair. A fixed point from where Perjovschi has been conveying meaning for over a decade and an active space of freedom, self-determination, solidarity, and coherence.

Gloria Luca (b. 1988, Iasi, Romania) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Madrid and Iasi.

Luca followed the Critical Images post-master course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2019), she holds a Master in Photography and Video Art (2016) and a Bachelor in History and Theory of Art (2011) from George Enescu University of Arts in Iasi, Romania.

Luca has shown her works in: Biennale Jeune Création Européenne, Montrouge, France (2019); KulturKontakt Austria, Vienna (2018); The Art Encounters Foundation, Timisoara, Romania (2018); ANTICAMERA&Guests: Dan Perjovschi and Eduard Constantin, VOID. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot, apARTe Gallery, Iasi (2017); Ringturm Exhibition Centre, Vienna (2015); National Gallery - Trade Fair Palace, Prague (2015).

Internationally acclaimed artist and political activist DAN PERJOVSCHI (b. 29 October 1961, Sibiu, Romania) covers surfaces worldwide—walls, windows, ceilings, doors, floors—with his trenchant, terse cartoons, criticizing current geo-political, social, and cultural crises and customs almost as fast as they form.

He began developing his practice on the walls of his own apartment in the early 1980s, when the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu forced him to keep his subversive wit under cover. With the 1989 Romanian revolution, in which he participated, he was unleashed. For Perjovschi, everything is fair game, from the Occupy Wall Street Movement to the hierarchies of the art world to the apparent decline in the quality of Finnish men’s sperm. In his words: “Europe is one of my subjects. Everything else is the other. I look, understand, and visually translate local and global issues. […] I am more time-specific than site-specific.”