ISOLA ART CENTER
February 15 – March 15, 2025
“Duets” is a project by Fani Zguro. In each exhibition he invites another artist to exhibit together. In this collaboration with Isola Art Center in Milan, Dan Perjovschi and Fani Zguro presents a site-specific series of graffiti by spray on billboards in different areas of the city. This graffiti series is part of the project “Here”, which started in 2018.
Graffiti is a practice that has spread all over the world. It is an urban action that is often seen as a crime of vandalism, regardless of the originality of its maker. But if we must speak of vandalism, graffiti is perfectly comparable to the phenomenon of advertising posters. Both attempt to communicate through public spaces. Both are there for the sole aim of influencing a consumer (to paraphrase Pier Paolo Pasolini, our contemporary society does not set out to raise good kids, but good consumers). It is simultaneously interesting and grotesque to realize that in both cases we are looking at acts of vandalism. But in the case of graffiti those acts are punishable by law, while advertising posters are instead encouraged by various means and regulations. My proposed project “Here” is a ́marriage ́ of these actions. In my view, the ideal space on which to put graffiti is an advertising poster. The clandestine graffiti artist becomes happy and legal thanks to this courteously supplied and available space.
Dan Perjovschi was born in 1961 in Sibiu. Lives and works in Bucharest. He is a visual artist mixing drawing, comics and graffiti, commenting on current political, social or cultural issues. With his long experience acquired in the 1990s in post-Ceausescu Romania as a press illustrator, Dan Perjovschi brings to this graphic genre a quick and incisive hand associated with black humour. He plays an active role in the development of civil society in Romania, through his editorial activity with Revista 22 (a cultural magazine from Bucharest) by stimulating exchanges between the Romanian and international contemporary art scene. In the last 10 years, he stopped working only on paper, to use chalk and marker on the walls of buildings and exhibition spaces, drawing with great freedom, even on floors, walls and windows. His drawings are covered or erased at the end of the exhibitions but continue to circulate and renew themselves constantly, mirroring the daily flow of information from which they originate. Perjovschi has chosen to play with this process of erasure and re-creation, of appearance and disappearance, sometimes involving the public, who unknowingly step on works of art or are invited to draw, sometimes even over the artist’s own drawings. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago); the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg); the MOT Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo); the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki); the 48th and 52nd Venice Biennale (Venice); the 9th Istanbul Biennale; Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg). The Michel Rein gallery will devote a solo exhibition to him in the first quarter of 2019. Perjovschi has won numerous awards such as the Princess Margriet Award of the European Cultural Foundation and the George Maciunas Prize. His work is in the collections of the Ludwig Museum (Budapest), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Tate Modern (London), the Nomas Foundation (Rome), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Nasher Museum of Art Duke University (Durham), the Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris), and the Fonds Municipal d’art contemporain de Paris.
Fani Zguro was born in 1977 in Tirana. Lives and works in Tirana and Milan. Zguro has been graduated at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (1998–2007). In 2007 he won the International Onufri Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana; in 2016 the International Mulliqi Prize assigned by the National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina; the Best Video-Art award assigned by TIFF Tirana and in 2021 Award TOP7 Gallery of ArtVilnius21. Zguro also curated the 14th International Onufri Prize at National Gallery of Arts in Tirana (2016) and in 2017 he was part of the AiR program at Q21 – Museums Quartier in Vienna and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2003–2004). Since 2015 he is part of NYC apexart’s jury. His work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée Marseille, Filmoteca Espanola Madrid, Photo Museum Braunschweig, Ost Anders Festival Nuremberg, Triënnale Kortrijk, 2nd Tirana Biennale, 3rd Mardin Biennial, 4th Young Artists Biennial of Bucharest, 6th Wrong Biennale, 6th Çanakkale Biennial, 7th Edition of the Black-and-White Biennial in Satu Mare, 13th Biennale of Cairo, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Belvedere 21 – Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Vienna, Palais Populaire Berlin, the New York Public Library and Centre Pompidou Paris.