Art with a civic message
We use film, music, theater, and visual arts as methods to promote civic engagement and human rights.
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Theater, film, music and poetry
Art finds its place in many of Forum’s projects – at CivicON we brought youth theater, art films, and music, while Fellowship of Questions used poetry to promote communication between different cultures. In addition, we regularly present theater plays with a civic message, such as “3 milioane”, and organize screenings of documentary and art films.
Artist and Citizen (Dan Perjovschi)
Permanent exibition
Perjovschi draws with markers or chalk on the walls, windows, and ceilings of museums and art centers around the world. Berlin, New York, London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Paris, Krakow, Vilnius, Marseille, Stockholm, San Francisco, Reykjavik, Seoul, Dakar, Jakarta, Wuhan, Ljubljana, Pristina, Madrid, Lyon, and more.
His art speaks to both museum directors and gatekeepers. His temporary installations mix small everyday life topics with global political events.
The vast majority of Perjovschi’s projects are erased, washed, or painted over, partially escaping artistic historicization or commercial valorization. Perjovschi exhibits in the halls, corridors, or on the glass walls of cultural institutions so that his drawings are visible from the outside without a ticket.
The artist moves from the museum to the street with a drawing that is neither a caricature, nor raw art, nor comics, nor graffiti, but a bit of all these. An “intelligent graffiti” that remains critical, simple, and direct in the midst of the extravagant-cool art boom.
Perjovschi continuously draws across all meridians of the world so that at any minute of any day in every year, there is always a drawing accessible to the public somewhere. A drawing-idea or Gedankebild, as the Germans say…
In recent years, his drawings have helped or assisted public activist, environmental, humanitarian, non-profit, or independent movements in Romania and beyond.
Dan Perjovschi is the laureate of the Gheorghe Ursu Foundation for Human Rights in 1999. He received the Henkel Prize for Contemporary Drawing in 2002, the George Maciunas Prize in 2004, the Princess Margriet Prize of the European Cultural Foundation (with Lia Perjovschi) in 2012, and the Rosa Shapre Prize of Kunsthalle Hamburg in 2016. In the same year, he was awarded the special “Artist/Citizen” prize at the CERE public participation gala.
The selection at Casa Forum presents invitations, postcards, leaflets, and posters from the artist’s exhibitions over the last 15 years.
Tolerance Traveling Poster Show
Current Exibition
The “Tolerance” project was initiated by New York-based graphic designer and illustrator Mirko Ilić in 2017. Renowned designers, artists, and illustrators from over forty countries were invited to visually express their understanding of tolerance in their native language.
Constantly expanding, the collection has already traveled around the world, being exhibited, among other places, at Facebook’s headquarters, at design festivals in the United States, Austria, and the Netherlands, at the Design Museum in London, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, in Timișoara, South Africa, Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Forum Apulum produced a series of 40 posters in 2019 and organized exhibitions at the National Museum of Union, at the Fabrica de Timp Liber (Turda), and in Satu Mare.
Alongside the exhibition, a series of workshops were organized with high school students to discuss prejudices and the importance of tolerance.
A selection of the posters is still on display at our headquarters – Casa Forum.
Women in the Polish Poster
2019
A selection of works by prominent representatives of the Polish School of Poster.
The exhibition, based on the largest private collection of Polish posters, comprising over 40,000 works belonging to Krzysztof Dydo, an expert in poster art and owner of a gallery in Kraków, features more than thirty works by renowned Polish graphic artists.
The exhibition was organized at our headquarters – Casa Forum, on the occasion of the Museum Night event (2019).
Homesickness (George Roșu)
2018
About George Roșu, those who draw point fingers at him, reproaching him for not drawing but writing, while those who write, in turn, reproach him for not writing but drawing. George Roșu persists, and he has been doing this for 15 years. By filtering both the sensational and the mundane through artistic lenses, he manages (sometimes) to bring to light alternative realities, which he simply calls stories.
In “Dor de țară” (Homesickness), the retrospective gaze of emigrants toward the life they lived in their homeland, and the repeated reproduction of memories, distort the facts they actually experienced, transposing an alteration of those facts and feelings into their emotional attitude.
Thus, the artist decided to replace the romanticized memory of those “abroad” by artistically reinterpreting the major themes of the moment with the realities of contemporary Romania.
To achieve this, he surveyed people who no longer live in the country and concluded that, from the moment of living “abroad,” surrounded by access to information and basic necessities (water, electricity, gas, pineapple, chips, Netflix, etc.), the emigrant erases from their Western employee memory the fact that: poverty in Romania is nearly 50%, most Romanians do not have indoor toilets, education changes its methodology with every new Minister of Education, prisons take priority over hospitals, and Romanian traditions are, in fact, hybrids of the traditions of migratory peoples in Romania.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-qmRqit1TA
We build with pride
@Forum Apulum
from 2017.