TEMPERANCE
“I shall tell a legend of the bird that becomes a blade for the sake of truth.”*
The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) invites visitors to linger in the space between being and non-being, between places and non-places – a terrain where forms shift, identities gather force, and truth reveals itself through metamorphosis rather than declaration.
Within this charged atmosphere, the group exhibition of Rudy Dumas (FR), Anita Horváth (HU), and Monika Kováčová (CZ) unfolds as a meeting point of material, memory, and myth. Each artist brings forward works shaped by intimate histories and collective echoes, allowing the viewer to sense the pulse of experiences that resist simplification.
Their practices ask us to pause inside states of becoming – to witness how identity is layered, fragile, and powerful all at once; to observe the negotiations that shape Roma presence today; and to understand the act of transformation as a form of truth-seeking that is both personal and communal.
TEMPERANCE
“I shall tell a legend of the bird that becomes a blade for the sake of truth”
Curated by RomaMoMA | Emese Molnár
Opening: December 11, 17:30 (in the presence of the artists)
Exhibition dates: 12 December, 2025 – 31 March 2026
ERIAC Gallery Space, Berlin – 10117 Mitte, Reinhardtstraße 41-43.
Rudy Dumas, Sedentary Stigma, 2025, steel, plaster, bronze, charcoal, 1 m x 35 cm x 25 cm
Rudy Dumas (b. 1993) is a visual and performance artist of French Traveller background, whose practice emerges from the landscapes and lived realities of marginality. Raised within a family of travelling circus performers, he developed an early sensitivity to movement, borders, and improvised territories. These formative experiences continue to guide his attention toward peripheral sites such as wastelands, vacant lots, squats, and other transitional spaces. Through these environments, he examines the ways in which visible and invisible boundaries shape both places and social relations, producing mechanisms of exclusion while also enabling forms of resilience. Working with materials such as concrete, asphalt, and bronze, Dumas transforms remnants of the built environment into sculptural narratives of memory and resistance.
His research has been presented in prominent institutions and contexts, including the 2019 Mulhouse Biennale of Young Creation, the 2021 ArtPress Biennale at MAMC Saint-Étienne, and the 2025 exhibition Les Rois Morts at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève. Dumas is the recipient of the 2021 ArtPress Young Creation Prize and the 2022 Normandy Region Young Creation Prize. His work has been featured in Libération, Le Monde, and ArtPress, highlighting the significance of his approach within current debates around Romani memory, reparation, and identity. He received a honorary mention of the Jury in the frame 2025 ERIAC–DAAD Residency Programme for Arts and Media.
Anita Horváth (b. 1997, Székesfehérvár, Hungary) is a visual artist of Roma origin from Hungary, whose work explores identity, self-representation, and the visual language of collective memory through the lens of Roma women’s experiences. She graduated from the Budapest Metropolitan University (BA in Photography), focusing on the photographic representation of the Hungarian Roma, and earned her MA in Photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), where her thesis project offered an autonomous reinterpretation of OMARA’s artistic legacy.
Her ongoing series “You Are Not Like Them” speaks from the double minority position of Roma women, challenging traditional roles and harmful stereotypes by reclaiming authorship over their own image. Horváth’s works have been exhibited at Capa Center (European Kinship, 2025), Bura Gallery (2024, 2025) in Budapest, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, Berlin (CARGO – of Dust and Ashes, 2024), and also featured during OFF-Biennale Budapest (these walls are not here to defend us, 2025). Her works have appeared in publications such as Élet és Irodalom, British Journal of Photography, Vogue Italia, HVG, and Népszava. Her solo exhibition “Igyekszik az ember lánya” (“A Woman Tries Her Best”) is on view at Bura Gallery until November 30, 2025. She is the winner of the 2025 ERIAC–DAAD Residency Programme for Arts and Media.
Monika Kováčová (b. 1992, Tekovské Lužany) is an artist, blacksmith and music producer based in Prague, whose work focuses on material agency. Her work engages with themes of minority politics and racial inequality, articulated through a mythopoetic language that bridges past and present while highlighting the fragmented nature of ancestral histories. She engages blacksmithing – a historically Roma craft – as a critical space for reimagining existence, tracing the intertwined histories of materials, confronting their complex legacies, and crafting new mythologies through an imaginative language. In her search for utopia, furthermore display symbolism and organic sculptures which intertwined with natures of rural & escapist lives.
Kováčová studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and exhibited at institutions such as AQB Project Space in Budapest, Karlin Studios – CCA Futura in Prague, Volkstheater Wien, Jedna Dva Tři Gallery in Prague, Galerie Holešovická Šachta, Galerie NTK, etc. She is one of the winners of the 2025 ERIAC-Villa Romana artists in residence programme.