Blog Authors
Horea Avram
Horea Avram is an art historian, media theorist and independent curator. He researches and writes about art and visual culture in relationship with media technology. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema and Media, Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. PhD in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He is the President of AICA-Romania (International Association of Art Critics). Member of International Society for Intermedial Studies – ISIS (since 2013), NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (since 2022) and UAP – Union of the Romanian Artists (since1997). Research fellow of the New Europe College – Institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences, 2017-2018. Independent curator since 1996. He has curated most notably for Venice Biennale in 1999. Project Manager at ECCA (European Center for Contemporary Art), Cluj, Romania (2018-2019). President of the Council of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (Ministry of Culture), Romania (2020-2022).
The Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From Abduction to Seduction, from Marginal to Universal
Daniel Baker
Baker is a Romani Gypsy artist, researcher, and curator. Originally from Kent, and currently based in London, his work is exhibited internationally and can be found in collections across the globe. Baker earned a PhD in 2011 from the Royal College of Art, with his dissertation, “Gypsy Visuality: Gell’s Art Nexus and its Potential for Artists”, after previously earning an MA in Sociology/Gender and Ethnic Studies from Greenwich University, and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design. Baker has contributed to numerous exhibitions, held various residencies, and curated several commissions. He previously worked as an exhibitor and consultant for the first and second Roma events at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – “Paradise Lost” and “Call the Witness”, which took place during the 52nd and 54th International Art Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia, respectively. In 2018, hosting an open call for curators, an international jury consisting of Professor Dr Ethel Brooks, Tony Gatlif, Miguel Ángel Vargas, and ERIAC management selected Baker to curate the Roma Collateral Event at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia. Baker’s work examines the role of art in the enactment of social agency, through an eclectic practice that interrogates contemporary art discourse and its social implications via the reconfiguration of elements of the Roma aesthetic.
Guided Tour of FUTUROMA Exhibition with Curator Daniel Baker
Daniel Baker: Emergency Artefact #1 (2016)
Reframing Restitution: The Case for a Roma MetaMuseum
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion. Video
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 1
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 2
ADJACENT : RomaMoMA Nomadic Library display at Vulnerable Archives, SAVVY Contemporary
Zsófia Bihari
Bihari studied Cultural History and Theory in Berlin. She was responsible for the third Roma Pavilion at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia as assistant curator and project coordinator of ERIAC. She is currently working in the field of non-formal historical education.
A Roma Museum – The Promise of a Discursive Space, and a Source of Knowledge
Nicoleta Bitu
Bitu has been active in the field of human rights and women’s rights for over 30 years, at the forefront of the European mobilisation of Romani women activists, and of advocacy for the rights of Roma. A recognised and published expert in her field, she is the founder of Romani CRISS, served as Director of Romano ButiQ, and offered consultancy to the Open Society Foundations, the Council of Europe, the European Commission, made a major contribution to the establishment of ERIAC: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, and served as Chair of the Roma Archive. Her work has provoked the Romani and feminist movements to think and act based on the universality of human rights when it comes to Romani women. The foundation of her training and development is the work she has done in the early years of her activism, in local communities affected by inter-ethnic conflicts, and her encouragement and formation of new generations of Romani activists of all genders is widely recognised.
Claiming the past by occupying contemporary spaces and minds
Boshko Boskovic
Boshko Boskovic is a New York based curator and Reiki practitioner and principal of Better Life Consulting LLC, an agency for arts and wellness. For the last 17 years, Boskovic has built a broad international portfolio, with extensive curatorial experience and strategic institution-building skills, and a focus on developing contemporary art programmes. He has curated exhibitions throughout North America and Europe, and written texts and essays for exhibition publications. He is a Reiki Master, trained and certified in the Usui Shiki Ryoho lineage by Aki Hirata, Manu del Prete and Alice Jones.
Reclaiming Ourselves Through Our Labour: Selma Selman’s artistic practice and modes of healing
Ethel Brooks
Ethel Brooks is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. She has conducted research on a host of sites around the world including in London, Istanbul, Fall River, San Salvador, Dhaka and York City. Brooks is the author of Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) which received the award for Outstanding Book for 2010 from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the co-editor of the special issue of WSQ on “Activisms.” She has contributed articles to a number of academic journals, including Nevi Sara Kali and International Working Class History, as well as book chapters in Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective, Eds. Daniel A Bender and Richard Greenwald, (Routledge, 2003) and Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, Eds. Judith Gerson and Diane L. Wolf (Duke University Press, 2007).
Professor Brooks is currently working on two book projects: Disrupting the Nation: Land Tenure, Productivity and the Possibilities of a Romani Post-Coloniality, and (Mis)Recognitions and (Un)Acknowledgements: Visualities, Productivities and the Contours of Romani Feminism, both of which focus on political economy and cultural production and the increasing violence against Romani (Gypsy) citizens worldwide.
Françoise Dallemagne
is a French curator and in charge of collections and research at Mucem (Museum od Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean). In 2014, she was the associate curator of the carnival exhibition, “Le monde à l’envers” at Mucem, then of the bathing exhibition, “Bath time!” in Chania (Crete) in 2022. She curated two A-Z exhibitions at Mucem: “Flora” (2020) and “Earth” (2022). She co-curated the exhibition “Barvalo. Roma, Sinti, Manouches, Gitanos, Travellers…” held at the Mucem (2023). She has also conducted several field surveys on subjects such as carnivals, the revival of traditional jewellery in the Mediterranean, and Romani crafts and know-how.
Mucem’s Romani Collections: Bringing Old Collections Up-To-Date
Mihaela Drăgan
Actress and playwright who lives in Bucharest (RO) and works in several European countries. In 2014, she founded Giuvlipen Theatre Company, for which she is both actress and playwright, together with other Roma actresses. Over the past few years, she has been working in Berlin as an actress for Maxim Gorki Theatre, Heimathafen Neukölln, and Theatre Aufbau Kreuzberg. She was one of six finalists for the 2017 Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award in New York, and a 2020 nominee, an award which acknowledges the exceptional work of 20 theatre women around the world. In 2018, Drăgan was a resident artist in Hong Kong at Para Site Contemporary Art Centre, where she developed Roma Futurism, which lies at the intersection of Roma culture with technology and witchcraft. She was acknowledged by PEN World Voices: International Play Festival 2018 in New York as one of the ten most respected dramatists of the world. In 2019, she was one of the playwrights selected for the acclaimed Royal Court Theatre International Summer Residency in London, where she wrote a science-fiction play about a future utopian society of Roma witches who control technology and fight neo-fascist politics in Europe.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu
is a curator, writer and educator living in Berlin. Her interests lie in the intersection of contemporary art, politics, critical and gender theory and popular culture. As a curator, she acts between exhibition making and public programming, singular languages and collective energies, material and immaterial abstractions, worldly immersions and political cosmologies.
She is one of the section curators of ARCO Madrid. In the past, she was curator for steirischer herbst festival in Graz; curator/director for YAMA public screen in Istanbul; curatorial advisor for Gülsün Karamustafa’s Chronographia at Hamburger Bahnhof, artistic director for the festival Sofia Contemporary 2013 titled as Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground. Övül curated programs within 10th, 13th and 14th Istanbul Biennials; coordinated and organized different programs and events at Maybe Education and public programs for dOCUMENTA (13). As an educator, she taught in Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts, Linz University of Arts and Muthesius Arts University in Kiel. With her writing she contributes to different publications, online platforms and magazines such as Texte zur Kunstand Frieze.
Can We Live Together? Can We Sing Together? Of Alamo, Love And Loss.
Sebijan Fejzula
Sebijan Fejzula is a researcher in the project POLITICS – The politics of anti-racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, decision-making and collective struggles, and a PHD student in the doctoral programme, Human Rights in Contemporary Society, University of Coimbra, Portugal.
Sebijan is a co-founder member of Kale Amenge (Roma for Ourselves), an independent anti-racist Roma political organisation that works for the collective emancipation of the Roma people and the construction of Roma political autonomy.
Thinking and Building through Roma Positionality
Julia Ferloni
French curator and specialist in the art and societies of Oceania. She taught this discipline at Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and published several popular books and articles on the history of the discovery of the Pacific. She also initiated the reopening of the anthropology gallery of the Museum of Natural History in Rouen, and was curator of its section devoted to Oceania with Te Papa Tongarewa, National Museum of New Zealand (2011). From 2011 to 2014, Julia Ferloni headed the scientific hub of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation and Restoration of Heritage (CICRP), based in Marseille. She then joined the Museum of Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem) as head of the Craft, Commerce and industry Collection, and curator of L’Amour de A à Z (Love from A to Z, 2018) and Barvalo (2023). She specialises in accompanying participatory projects in museums.
BARVALO: Designing an exhibition on and with Roma communities in a French national museum
Mucem’s Romani Collections: Bringing Old Collections Up-To-Date
Meghan Forbes
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Previously, she was the C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe at MoMA. Meghan’s writings have appeared widely, in both scholarly and popular publications, such as ArtMargins, Umění/Art, Hyperallergic and post: notes on art in a global context. She has also contributed to monographs and exhibition catalogues on the artists Alice Trumbull Mason, Toyen and Władysław Strzemiński. Meghan is the sole editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) and co-curator of BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels (Museum of Modern Art Library, 2018). She is the founder and co-editor of harlequin creature, a not-for-profit arts and literary imprint of handmade books and magazines established in 2011.
The body as archive, archiving one´s self
Kata E. Fris
Fris worked at Amaro Drom – Ember az emberért [Human for Human] Roma Foundation in Budapest from 1997-2001, realising human rights and arts programmes. In parallel, she worked on the Amaro Drom cultural and public life magazine, first as an editorial coordinator and manager, then as editor, from 2003 until the magazine’s forced termination in 2010. In 2002, she was invited to work at the municipal Cigány Ház [Gypsy House] – Romano Kher by director Jenő Zsigó, following their collaborative civil work. As Cultural Manager and events organiser, she worked on countless arts and professional programmes, contributing to the extremely rich, diverse and productive period for both the institution and the Roma community in Budapest. From the institution’s reorganisation in 2010 until 2014, Fris was communications coordinator for the EU project: Equal Treatment Authority. Since 2012, she is a community sociological researcher at the Jakab Gláser Memorial Foundation in Josephstadt (Budapest’s 8th District), also working to produce projects based upon this research. Within that framework, her short film, Félelem a falakra volt írva [Fear was Written on the Walls] premiered 6 April 2021.
Spark, burn every moment – reflections on a legend
Viktória Gere
is an art historian with a focus on contemporary art. She is interested in researching and challenging established narratives by presenting works of art in new contexts. Viktória believes that artistic practices which question the norms of our society can have a huge impact on the audience, provided that they are presented sensibly and critically. Viktória has worked in various cultural and art institutions in Berlin and London and writes about exhibitions that pose exciting questions.
From the Possoir to the Bathtub – Selma Selman Destroys Conventions with Axe and Drill
Marina Gržinić
Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theorist, and artist based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a prominent contemporary theoretical and critical figure in Slovenia. Since 1993, she has been employed at the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). Since 2003, she has also been a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Gržinić does innovative work in practice research, and she is a collaborative video artist, working together with Aina Šmid, an art historian and artist, also from Ljubljana, since 1982.
A Roma Future through a Process of Decoloniality
Eszter György
Eszter György (1982) received her MA at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and her PhD in History at ELTE, in 2013. Her dissertation, written about Roma cultural practices and identity building processes of the eighth district in Budapest, was published as a book in 2021. Since 2012, she has been involved in several EU projects (Erasmus Mundus and Horizon 2020 projects), focusing on cultural heritage, cultural participation and minority heritage. She is a senior lecturer at the Atelier Department for Interdisciplinary History. Her fields of research and publications cover Roma cultural history, Roma heritage in Hungary, and urban inequalities. In 2021, she participated in the realisation of the exhibition, Collectively Carried Out: Tamás Péli’s Birth, in the Budapest History Museum, in the framework of the Off-Biennale Budapest and RomaMoMA project of ERIAC Berlin.
Oto Hudec
Multimedia visual artist, who focuses on ecology, immigration and the impact of globalisation on the environment. Hudec graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
Oto Hudec and Emília Rigová: a dialogue
Raino Isto
Raino Isto, PhD, is an educator, art historian, curator and archivist. They are currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Art in Tirana (Albania), and the editor-in-chief of ARTMargins Online, an open-access platform for research and art criticism focused on the former Eastern and Central Europe. Their writing has been published in Third Text, RACAR, ARTMargins, and The Getty Research Journal, among other journals.
Sead Kazanxhiu’s The Nest: Making Space and Envisioning Agency for Marginalised Cultures
Vladan Jeremić
Vladan Jeremić is an artist, editor and curator from Belgrade, Serbia. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. In his collaborative artistic practice with Rena Raedle, they explore the relation between art and politics, unveiling the contradictions of today’s societies and developing transformative potentials of art. See: http://raedle-jeremic.net
How Many Swallows Make a Summer? On Sead Kazanxhiu’s Nests
Timea Junghaus
Art historian, contemporary art curator, and Executive Director of the Berlin-based ERIAC: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture. She has researched and published extensively on the conjunctions of modern and contemporary art with critical theory, with particular reference to issues of cultural difference, colonialism, and minority representation.
Argument for a Roma Transnational Museum
The Art of Resistance – Resistance Through Art
Eszter Lázár
Curator and lecturer based in Budapest. She holds a PhD in cultural studies from the Doctoral School of Literary Studies, University of Pécs. In addition to teaching at the Department of Art Theory and Curatorial Studies in the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, she curates exhibitions and collaborates on projects (e.g., OFF-Biennale Budapest 2015, 2017; curated by, 2018 in Vienna with Edina Nagy; Residency Under Investigation at tranzit.sk, Bratislava 2017; The Blue Room, with artist duo Tehnica Schweiz, 2019). Between 2016–2019 she was a researcher of the Film Section in the international RomArchive project. She is a member of an ongoing collaborative project with the Semmelweis Medical History Museum in Budapest: Waiting Room – Women Healers and Patients on the Periphery of Medicine. She joined the curatorial team of the OFF-Biennale Budapest in 2019.
Delaine Le Bas
Artist. She is currently one of the artists in The Crack Begins, within the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020), and Guest Professor at UdK – University of the Arts Berlin.
RomaMoMA Just do it! B.A.M.N – An Idea For a New Museum
Maria Lind
Curator, critic and curator, currently based in Moscow, where she is Councillor of Culture at the Embassy of Sweden.
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion. Video
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 2
Katariina Lillqvist
Katariina Lillqvist is a Finnish-Czech film director, media artist and curator of the Museum of Finnish Roma Culture, who splits her time between Prague and Helsinki. She started to document the Finnish and Czech Roma communities during the late 1980s, after discovering her own Roma ancestry. She is also well-known for her stop-motion animations, which are based on old Roma stories and legends. Over 30 years, her films have won awards at major international festivals, including a Silver Bear for the best short film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1996, and a special jury prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2017. At the 2019 edition of Animac, the International Animation Film Festival of Lleida, Spain, she was named Master of Animation in recognition of her lifetime achievements in animation.
The Museum of Finnish Roma Culture
Nikola Ludlová
Nikola Ludlová has a background in history and Romani studies. She is of Czech–Roma origin and was born in socialist Czechoslovakia. Although not being professional in any branch of the creative industry, nor trained academically as an art historian, critic or theoretician, she has been interested particularly in the social, political and historical aspects of how the system of art operates and the possibilities of institutional reform in line with decolonial, feminist, environmentalist and social justice agendas. Recently, she joined the Jindřich Chalupecký Society (SJCH) in Prague as a social inclusion and ecological sustainability coordinator. SJCH is a major non-profit supporter of contemporary Czech art. It organizes exhibitions, public events, residencies for artists and curators, educational and publication projects. Since 1990, the Society has awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for visual artists up to 35 years of age. SJCH is also the only Czech partner involved in the international project, Islands of Kinship, which aims to instil practices in contemporary art institutions that are more ecological and socially sustainable.
Alina Maggiore
is an Italian-German doctoral student in social anthropology at Aix-Marseille University in France and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Germany. Based at the Mucem (Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean), she holds a BA in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in Migration and Intercultural Mediation from the Universities of Barcelona, Montpellier, Strasbourg, and Venice. In 2018, she joined the Mucem team to prepare the “Barvalo” exhibition and the survey-collection “Romani Professions and Know-how in Europe and the Mediterranean”. She is co-editor of “Barvalo” catalogue (2023, Mucem/Anamosa) along with Françoise Dallemagne, Julia Ferloni, Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Jonah Steinberg.
Mucem’s Romani Collections: Bringing Old Collections Up-To-Date
Samuel Mago
Samuel (Sami) Mago is a writer, artist and Romani activist. Since 2000, he has lived in Vienna, Austria, where he currently studies transcultural communication at the University of Vienna, and is involved in the Romano Centro (among other things, as a member of the editorial staff of the association’s magazine). He also works as a trainer for learning how to deal with anti-gypsyism and for ORF radio productions. In 2014, he won the speech competition, ‘Sag’s multi’, with a speech on Roma, anti-gypsyism and tolerance. In 2015, he received the exil-jugend-literaturpreis (the literary prize for young people of publisher edition exil in Vienna), and since then has been a member of the exil-autorInnenwerkstatt of edition exil. In 2016, he received the Roma Literature Prize of the Austrian PEN Club. In 2017, together with his brother Károly, he published the volume of stories, glücksmacher – e baxt romani.
Reinventing the Romani wheel: a visual essay on the history of Rom*nja under socialist rule
Joci Márton
Joci Márton is a Roma LGBTQ+ activist from Hungary. He was born in 1985 and grew up in a small mining town in northeastern Hungary. Márton received his degree in pedagogy with a specialisation in Romology, and right after college began to teach in a public primary school in the 8th district of Budapest, where almost all the students were Roma. He also worked in the Prime Minister’s Office, Department on Hungarian Minority Abroad as an officer on minority and educational affairs. Márton took part in the Roma Studies Program at the Central European University, and has many years of experience in the field of Roma civil society. He was a volunteer at Uccu Roma Informal Education Foundation, where he moderated discussions among young adults about Roma identity and racism. These personal experiences taught him a lot about how the majority thinks about Roma, and these encounters trained him in how to engage in honest discussions about difficult topics. He was a scholar at the Open Society Foundation Youth Exchange Program, where he organised Owning the Game, a Roma LGBTQ+ community photo exhibition. Márton’s work focuses mainly on intersectionality and identity politics, and he is a founding member of “Ame Panzh”, an informal Roma group which broadcasts content on social media to inform public discourse about minorities and thematises recent topics from a feminist / Queer Roma point of view.
Owning the Game: Intersectional Self-Representation in the Roma LGBTQ+ Communities
Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist based at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He has written extensively in African history and politics and critical theory, including On the Postcolony (2001); Critique of Black Reason (2017); Necropolitics (2019); and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2019). His books have been translated into numerous languages. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the winner of the 2018 Gerda Henkel Award and the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award.
Suzana Milevska
Suzana Milevska is a curator and theorist of visual art and culture, based in Skopje, North Macedonia. She was Principal Investigator at Politecnico di Milano for the project, TRACES – Horizon 2020 (2016-2019), and was appointed the first Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Art Vienna (2013-2015). She holds a PhD in visual culture from Goldsmiths College London. She curated the exhibitions: The Renaming Machine, Roma Protocol (Austrian Parliament, Vienna), and Call the Witness (BAK, Utrecht), and initiated Call the Witness–Roma Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2011). More recently, she curated the exhibitions: Paying Attention (Akademie Graz), Contentious Objects/Ashamed Subjects (Politecnico di Milano, Milan) and Rewriting the Protocols: Naming, Renaming and Profiling, RomArchive (https://www.romarchive.eu/en/visual-arts/subsection-rewriting-protocols/). She published the book, Gender Difference in the Balkans (2010), and edited The Renaming Machine: The Book (2010), and On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency (2016). In 2012, she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.
RomaMoMA: An Opportunity for Differencing the Museum Canons
Why Have There Been No Great Roma Women Artists?
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas was born 1978 in Zakopane (PL). She graduated from the Sculpture Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in 2004. She participated in the International Sculpture Symposium in Brno (CZ, 2012), and was co-creator of the exhibition Zalikierdo Drom in Warsaw (2014). She was awarded a scholarship of the US Government International Visitor Leadership Program in the USA on the subject of Promoting Social Good Through the Arts (2015). Mirga-Tas received awards at the 42nd and 44th Biennale of Painting Bielska Jesień (2015, 2019), and participated in the International Art Symposium at the Moravian Gallery in Brno (2011, 2017). She also participated in the 3rd Art Biennale in Timisoara (RO, 2019), the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), and the Warsaw Gallery Weekend (2020). Mirga-Tas was awarded a scholarship of Poland’s Minister of Culture (2018). Mirga-Tas is engaged in many social art projects aimed at counteracting exclusion and racial discrimination and xenophobia.
Avni Mustafa
Avni Mustafa is a human rights activist, trainer and expert on Roma Inclusion. He has been working on Minority issues for over 20 years and holds a BA in Management from the University of Pjeter Budi.
Avni was born in Prishtina, in 1987. Lives Plemetina, a small multi-ethnic village in Kosovo. Avni’s mother tongue is Romani, speaks fluently in 3 languages: Albanian, English and Serbian. As a young activist, Avni managed local NGO “Romano Resaipe”, here he published an article entitled “The needs and problems of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian in the municipality of Obiliq”, which has shaped his interest and engagement with the topic over the years. His professional experience includes working with Balkan Sunflowers International, as a production media manager, where he produced over 50 eyewitness reports related to Roma life in Kosovo and North Macedonia. All reports were broadcast by public television in Kosovo RTK. He is Director of the Rolling Film Festival, for films made by and about Roma to fight discrimination and dispel negative stereotypes, which were well attended by all facets of Kosovo society. Avni is ERIAC Media and Information section coordinator, and Executive Director of Roma Versitas Kosovo, a leading student support organization with more than 10 different programs and projects seeking better inclusion of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian community members in Kosovo’s society.
Farija Mehmeti in conversation with Avni Mustafa
Katalin Németh
Németh is an alumna of the Romani Studies Program, and of the School of Public Policy Program at the Central European University in Budapest. She led ERIAC’s Cultural Institutions Network Initiative (CINI) project.
A Roma Museum – The Promise of a Discursive Space, and a Source of Knowledge
Norbert Oláh
Norbert Oláh (Hatvan, 1990) is a painter, and holder of the Béla Gruber Prize. He studied animation in high school in Eger, and in 2010 he continued his studies in painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where he received his diploma in 2016. He lives in the 8th District of Budapest, from where he draws upon a large part of his subject matter.
The anxieties of the ‘Roma Artist’
Corina Oprea
is a curator, editor and researcher, focusing on contemporary art, visual and performance culture. Oprea is the co-editor of the anthology, Climate: Our Right to Breathe, published by K Verlag in 2023. She has served as Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online, the digital platform for research and arts of a network of some 15 leading European museums and arts organisations, and as lecturer at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg (Sweden). Between 2017-2018, she was Artistic Director of Konsthall C, in Stockholm, with a program on Decolonisation in the North. Corina holds a PhD from University of Loughborough (UK), where her thesis was “The End of the Curator – On Curatorial Acts as Collective Production of Knowledge”. She is curator of Timisoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture, and of the grand-scale inaugural exhibition, Chronic Desire – Sete cronică. Born 1981 in Bucharest, Oprea lives and works in Stockholm.
Nedjo Osman
born in Skopje in the former Yugoslavia (today the capital of the Republic of North Macedonia), studied at the Film and Theatre Academy in Novi Sad (today in the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia). He began his acting career at the Roma Theatre Pralipe in Skopje and worked as an actor at the National Theatre KPGT in Subotica (also in Vojvodina), as well as at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad and the JDP – Jugoslovensko Dramsko Pozorište [Yugoslav Drama Theatre] in Belgrade (capital of today’s Serbia). He took on leading roles in over 40 productions ranging from classical to modern and received numerous awards for his work.
After the outbreak of war in the Balkans, Osman emigrated to Germany as a member of the Pralipe Theatre ensemble at the Theatre an der Ruhr in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Since 1995, he has been artistic director of the Theatre TKO Köln / Theatre Kokotovic, the company of Osman together with Nada Kokotovic. He also works as a freelance actor, director, poet and journalist. As a theatre educator, he has been working with young Roma, Sinti and non-Roma on various artistic projects in Germany and abroad.
In the early aughts, he presented programmes in Romani language at Radio Multi-Kulti in Berlin, and until 2014, also at Deutsche Welle in Bonn. As a long-time activist and advocator of Roma culture, Osman tries to awaken interest in the art of the Sinti and Roma – as one of the most important elements of Roma culture and identity. He received the “Šaip Yusuf” award for lifetime achievement in 2017.
Presentation of Roma Culture and Identity in Theatre
Tanja Ostojić
(*1972 Yugoslavia) is Berlin-based performance and interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator. She is internationally renowned as a pioneer of institutional gendered critique, and for her work in the field of socially and politically engaged and public art, particularly with regard to migration politics. She uses diverse media in her artistic research, examining feminist issues, power relationships, social configurations, racism, economy, and bio-politics between others. Ostojić includes herself as a character in performances and works predominantly from the migrant woman’s perspective, while political positioning and ethical participation define the approaches of her work. Since 1994, she has presented her work in a large number of solo and group exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2011, and MUMOK in Vienna. She has given lectures, seminars and workshops at academic conferences and art universities throughout Europe and in the Americas. Ostojić’s work maintains a high level of theoretical reference and has been analysed and reviewed globally, and included in numerous books, periodicals and anthologies, while The Guardian has chosen her, with her project, “Looking for a Husband with EU Passport” (2000-05), as one of the 25 best artists of the twenty-first century.
Bojana Pejić
Born 1948 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia, now Serbia), is an art historian and curator. She studied History of Art at the University of Belgrade, and in 2005 she defended her PhD: “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power in the SFR Yugoslavia (1945-1991)” at the Karl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. From 1977 to 1991, she was curator at the Student Cultural Centre of Belgrade University, and organised numerous exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. She has written criticism since 1971, and was editor of the art theory journal Moment (Belgrade, 1984-91). In 1995 she organised the international symposium, The Body in Communism, at the Literaturhaus in Berlin. Pejić was chief curator of the exhibition, After the Wall – Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, organised by Moderna Museet Stockholm (1999), and shown at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest (2000), and at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin (2000-2001). In 1999, Pejić was a co-curator of the exhibition, Aspects/Positions, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) in Vienna. She was artistic director of the international exhibition, Artist-Citizen, 49th October Salon in Belgrade in 2008, and chief curator of Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, shown at MUMOK and Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. She edited Gender Check: A Reader – Art and Theory in Eastern Europe in 2010. She co-curated the international exhibition, Good Girls – Memory, Desire, Power, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest (RO, 2013), and HERO MOTHER – Contemporary Art by post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism (Berlin, 2016). She is guest lecturer at Bauhaus University in Weimar with the course “Public Art and New Strategies” since 2014. She is also currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at New Europe College (NEC) in Bucharest (RO, Getty Program), 2018-2021. Pejić has lived and worked in Berlin since 1991.
Selma Pezerović
Selma Pezerović is founding executive editor of Phralipen portal and magazine, where she writes on themes of gender, religion, minority representation, cultural difference and otherness. Pezerović is co-author and co-editor of the book, Romanipe – From Shadow into Light (with Maja Grubišić, 2021, Zagreb: KALI SARA), a collection of narrative journalistic stories of Romani people from Croatia and the region. She has been awarded several scholarships for international programmes and journalism.
Art and Culture Matter More than Ever- Roma Biennale 2021
Andrea Pócsik
Pócsik is a film historian and cultural researcher, and senior lecturer at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. Her pedagogical activity is devoted to engaged scholarship and methodological developments combining theory and practice. Her most important projects are based on critical film education: founding the Roma Visual Lab at ELTE University (Budapest), and the KineDok Pázmány Filmclub, as well as participating in the international European University Film Award, and recently in collaboration with tranzit.hu founding a community space for informal learning and self-educational opportunities for students of lesser means. Apart from teaching, she is often involved in contemporary artistic and cultural projects, as a curator, organiser and expert. She participated in OFF-Biennale Budapest in 2015 and 2021. She publishes reviews, articles and book chapters on contemporary art and film, primarily in Hungarian, but also in German and English. She has conducted research on Roma representation within ELTE University’s Film, Media and Cultural Theory Doctoral Programme. A decade of her research resulted in a book published in 2017: Átkelések. A romaképkészítés (an)archeológiája [Passages: An (An)archaeology of Roma Image-Making] (Gondolat Kiadó). She contributed to the founding of the first international digital archive of the Roma, the RomArchive. Her recent research is based on memory and archival studies, currently as a Goethe-Institut fellow at the documenta Archive in Kassel, Germany.
Spark, burn every moment – reflections on a legend
The Intersecting Gaps of Unknowing
Viktória Popovics
is a curator at the Ludwig Museum – Museum for Contemporary Art Budapest, where she has contributed to several large-scale exhibitions focusing on Central and Eastern European art ( Ludwig Goes POP – The East Side Story (2015), Permanent Revolution. Ukrainian Art Today (2018), IPARTERV50+. The Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde (2019), Slow Life. Radical Everyday (2021), Handle with CARE (2023). Her academic interest centers around female artists and women’s issues; in recent years, she has focused on the representation of motherhood in contemporary art. She is part of the international research seminars Narrating Art and Feminism: Eastern Europe and Latin America (Connecting Art Histories Initiative, Getty Foundation, 2021-2023) and contributed to the research project Secondary Archive * Platform for Women Artists from Central and Eastern Europe. She is a member of the Hungarian Section of AICA.
Intersectional Dimensions of Care. Curatorial Considerations around the Exhibition Handle with Care
Nihad Nino Pušija
Born 1965 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, is a fine art photographer. His work (since 1992), focused primarily on documentary and portrait photography, aims to capture Roma identity in Berlin, where he has been based for the past 27 years, and elsewhere in Europe. Important themes in his work include: the politics of recognition, minority positions in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice, south-east Europe, refugees, conflict resolution, integration and the Roma in Europe. His work has received support from nGbK Berlin (New Society for Visual Arts), Museum of European Cultures, and Allianz Cultural Foundation. He was included in both the 1st and 2nd Roma Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2007 and 2011. Pušija lives and works in Berlin.
Elena Quintarelli
Elena Quintarelli holds an MA in Media and Visual Anthropology from FU Berlin. Her research interests include migratory policies, memory and national identity, colonial pasts and decolonial options. She works in Berlin as a museum educator, and in the production and conception of cultural events and workshops on ideas of archiving, legacies, colonial pasts and their influence into the present. She worked as project manager of the festival “BE.BOP-Black Europe Body Politics”, and as a researcher and curator at SAVVY’s Documentation Centre.
Practising Archival Alliances: RomaMoMA at Vulnerable Archives
Isabel Raabe
is a curator working in an interdisciplinary way. In her curatorial work, she is interested in curatorial and artistic decolonial strategies that disrupt Western perspectives. In her projects she wants to show decolonial perspectives and new narratives. She studied dance in Berlin and New York and cultural management in Berlin. Together with Franziska Sauerbrey, she was director of the independent büro für Kulturelle Angelegenheiten (office for cultural affairs) in Berlin for 12 years, curating and producing cultural projects amongst others for the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Agency for Civic Education. She curated exhibitions, performance and theatre festivals, with international artists. In 2014, she and Sauerbrey initiated the “RomArchive – Digital Archive of Sinti and Roma“, which went online in 2019. RomArchive won the European Cultural Heritage Award in 2019 and the Grimme Online Award 2020. Currently she is working on the long-termed project TALKING OBJECTS, consisting of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE – Digital Archive for Decolonial Knowledge, and the think tank- and exhibition series TALKING OBJECTS LAB in Germany, Senegal and Kenya. Isabel Raabe is member of the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft and member of the curatorial team of the decolonial “artivistic” project BARAZANI.berlin.
Painting Back: Decolonization Through Art
Emese Révész
Révész (1967), art historian, completed her PhD in 2008 from the Art History Institute at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). Areas of her research include Early Modern Hungarian painting, 19th-20th century graphic art history, the history of book illustration, and the history of higher education in the arts. Bibliography: Firkaforradalom (Grafikatörténeti tanulmányok) [Scribble Revolution (Graphic Art History Studies)], 2019; A művészet kertje. Gross Arnold művészete [Art Garden: The Art of Arnold Gross], 2019; Kép, sajtó, történelem. Illusztrált sajtó Magyarországon 1870-1870 [Picture, Press, History: Illustrated Press in Hungary], Bp., 2015; Fényes Adolf [Adolf Fényes], Bp., 2014; Csók István [István Csók], Bp., 2010; A magyar historizmus [Hungarian Historicism], Bp., 2005. Selected curatorial work: Szigorúan ellenőrzött nyomatok. Magyar sokszorosított grafika 1945-1961 között [Hungarian Graphic Art Multiples 1945-1961]. Miskolc Gallery, 2018; Nyomtatás – nyomhagyás. Maurer Dóra grafikai munkássága [Printing – Leaving a Mark: The Graphic Art Oeuvre of Dóra Maurer]. Hungarian University of Fine Arts (MKE), Barcsay Hall, Budapest, 2017; Gyermek/Kor/Kép. Gyermek a magyar képzőművészetben [Child/Age/Image: Children in Hungarian Fine Art]. Budapest History Museum (BTM), 2016; Forradalom előtt. Képzőművészeti Főiskola 1945-1956 [Before the Revolution: The Academy of Fine Arts 1945-1956]. Hungarian University of Fine Arts (MKE); Bálványok és démonok. Csók István (1865-1961) életmű-kiállítása [Idols and Demons: Life-Work Exhibition of István Csók (1865-1961)]. István Csók Gallery – Municipal Gallery, Székesfehérvár, 2011
See: www.revart.eoldal.hu
The Historical Approach of Tamás Péli’s Panel Painting, Entitled Birth
Emília Rigová
Visual artist of Roma origin. She is also a university lecturer at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, where she teaches art courses. Her work focuses on the internal and external construction of the Roma identity, and the acquisition of the Roma body into the long history of European culture.
Oto Hudec and Emília Rigová: a dialogue
Lisa Marei Schmidt
Lisa Marei Schmidt is an art historian and curator serving as director of the Brücke Museum in Berlin since 2017. She studied art history and modern German literature in Marburg, Amsterdam, and Berlin, before graduating from the Royal College of Art in London.
She then worked as an assistant curator at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from 2012 to 2017 and was curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – in Berlin.
The Brücke Museum, located in the Dahlem area of Berlin, specializes in works by the artist group Die Brücke, founded in 1905 in Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
“I Sewed For Us”. RomaMoMA in Conversation with Lisa Marei Schmidt, Director of the Brücke Museum
Selma Selman
(b. 1991) is from Bosnia and Herzegovina and is of Romani origin. She earned her BFA in 2014 from Banja Luka University’s Department of Painting. In 2018, she graduated from Syracuse University with an MFA in Transmedia, Visual and Performing Arts. In her artwork, the ultimate aim is to protect and enable female bodies and enact a cross-scalar approach to the collective self-emancipation of oppressed women. Selman’s search for functional, contemporary political resistance stems from her personal experience of oppression from multiple directions and scale. Selman founded the organisation “Get the Heck to School”, which aims to empower Roma girls worldwide who have faced poverty and ostracization from society. Selman currently lives and works in Bihac (BIH) and New York. Selman participated in Tania Bruguera’s International Summer Academy in Salzburg, “Arte Util” in 2013. In 2014, Selman was the recipient of the Zvono Award, given to young artists in Bosnia, and in 2017 Selman was awarded the Trieste Contemporanea Award. In 2018, she was nominated for Forbes 30 under 30, Art and Style, and in 2019 she was the winner of the White Aphroid Award, Maribor (SLO), as well as winning the Power of Excellence Award from the Association of Business Women in BiH and Magazine Grazia, Sarajevo. Selman’s works have been shown, among others, at Kunsthalle Wien (2020); L’Onde Center for Art, Paris (2020); 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Queens Museum (2019); Villa Romana, Florence (2019); The Creative Time Summit, Miami (2018); 3. Berlin Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theatre (2017); acb Gallery, Budapest (2017); agnès b. Galerie Boutique, New York (2017); Good Children Gallery, New Orleans (2016); Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Banja Luka (BIH, 2014).
Nanette Snoep
is Director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum: Kulturen der Welt in Cologne since 2019, where she has introduced a decolonial strategy. With RESIST! The Art of Resistance (http://rjm-resist.de), about 500 years of anti-colonial resistance in the Global South, she has curated her first large-scale exhibition in Cologne. Between 2015 and 2018, she was Director of the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden, and the Völkerkunde Museum in Herrnhut. In Dresden, she curated an experimental expanding exhibition in ten steps, Prolog #1-10: Stories of People, Things and Places (2016-2018), which explored the ethnographic museum and its colonial legacies in an ongoing process. This curatorial concept was then taken up at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig under the name Werkstatt Prolog in 2018. For Leipzig, Snoep initiated a series of exhibitions, Grassi invites #, inviting external curators, artists, theatre makers, refugees, communities and students to draw out new perspectives on the museum’s collection and permanent exhibition. The final exhibition she organised in Saxony, Megalopolis – Voices from Kinshasa (2018), gave carte blanche to a collective of artists from Kinshasa (DRC).
Prior to her appointment in Germany in 2015, Snoep spent 16 years at the Paris Quai Branly Museum as Head of the “Historical and Contemporary Globalisation Collection”. In France, she curated 1931: Les étrangers au temps de l’Exposition coloniale (Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, Paris, 2008), Vodou: L’Art de Voir l’Invisible (Musée du Vodou, Strasbourg, 2013), and for the Quai Branly Museum, Recettes des Dieux: L’Invention du Fétiche (2009), Exhibitions: L’Invention du Sauvage (2011), and Les Maîtres du Désordre (2012), with additional venues at the Kunsthalle Bonn in 2012 (Narren. Künstler. Heilige. Lob der Torheit), and at the Fundacio La Caixa in Madrid in 2013 (Los Maestros del Caos).
Between 2004 and 2014, she also taught African Art History at l’École du Louvre in Paris and at the Université Nanterre.
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion. Video
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 2
Hajnalka Somogyi
curator based in Budapest. Since 2014, she has worked as leader and co-curator of OFF-Biennale Budapest, the largest state-free international art project in Central Europe, which she initiated. After two editions in 2015 and 2017, the third edition of the biennale is scheduled for May 2021. In 2013–2014, she was editor of artmagazin.hu. Between 2009–2012 she served as curator at Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, and between 2001–2006 at Trafo House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest. She co-founded two independent art spaces, Dinamo (2002–2006) and Impex (2006–2008), both in Budapest. She holds a degree in Art History from ELTE Budapest, and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Recent curated exhibitions include Hide and Seek, (various venues in Budapest, as part of OFF-Biennale 2017), Art Has No Alternative (tranzit.sk, Bratislava, 2015); Les statues meurent aussi (with artist István Csákány, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, 2014); and Yona Friedman: Architecture without building (with Nikolett Erőss, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, 2011–2012).
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion. Video
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 1
Jonah Steinberg
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina (from January 2023), is a sociocultural anthropologist engaged in the ethnography of Romani history. He is the author of two books, the first an award-winner from the University of North Carolina press and the second published to acclaim by Yale University Press, and the winner of two multi-year, single-investigator National Science Foundation grants, the first on child runaways in India, and the second on race, space, and segregation in southern Europe. Jonah was a co-curator of the Barvalo exhibition (Summer 2023) at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, the original proposal for which he presented to the museum years earlier.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Literary theorist, feminist critic, postcolonial theorist, and professor of comparative literature. She is professor at Columbia University, where she is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Considered one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals, Prof. Dr. Spivak is best known for her seminal essay, “Can the subaltern speak?”, and has eleven honorary doctorates form universities across the world.
Lecture: Prof. Dr. Gaytri Spivak on Affirmative Sabotage
Joanna Synowiec
Curator, cultural animator, artist, editor. Co-curator (with Katarzyna Roj) of Tajsa exhibition at Gallery BWA in Tarnów, and editor of the publication. The exhibition was dedicated to Roma communities and addressed the present situation of the Roma people in Europe. Co-author of exhibition Common Part – Social Archive at BWA Studio Gallery in Wrocław, which was the first step in realising a social archive. Synowiec is interested in independent artistic and post-artistic initiatives, group and collective work, as well as work with minority groups like prisoners and migrant women. She employs archived and oral stories as an artistic strategy, and she held a scholarship in 2015 from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage dedicated to migrant women. The Door Phone was a sound installation based on the human voice and was located at the entrance of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum. The stories recounted were the result of personal relationships and long private talks with these women. Transferred to public space, the stories established a multiplicity of narratives and micro-histories, creating an alternative to conventional history. This working strategy relates to the feminist idea of shining a light on the margins and bringing them into the centre. Synowiec is currently working on an exhibition and publication about the experience of motherhood and policy of care. She also runs the self-publishing printing house, Wild Pleasures.
Yesterday Can Tell Us a Lot About Tomorrow
Anna Lujza Szász
Sociologist, who currently teaches at Budapest Corvinus University. She is also project manager of the OFF-Biennale Budapest’s RomaMoMA section.
Some thoughts on the museum of Roma Contemporary Art
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion. Video
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 1
The Restitution of Romani Artworks and Artefacts. Panel Discussion- Transcript Part 2
Katalin Székely
curator and art historian based in Budapest. She is a doctoral candidate in the Doctoral Program in Film, Media and Contemporary Culture at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. In 2006, she was co-editor of the volume, Meet Your Neighbours with Tímea Junghaus, and in 2007 she was assistant curator alongside Tímea Junghaus of the First Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She was a curator at Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art between 2008–2013. Since 2014, she has been a member of the curatorial team of OFF-Biennale Budapest. Since 2015, as Creative Program Officer at Blinken OSA, she curates and coordinates exhibitions and other public programmes. Recent curated exhibitions include Collective Dreams and Bourgeois Villas (with Miklós Zsámboki, 2019 at OSA), Farewell to Spring (with József Mélyi, 2018 at OSA), Somewhere in Europe – Gaudiopolis (2017, at OSA, in the framework of OFF-Biennale Budapest).
Daniel Baker: Emergency Artefact #1 (2016)
Wojciech Szymański
Wojciech Szymański, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw, Poland. He is an independent curator and art critic; member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA; author of the book, The Argonauts: Postminimalism and Art After Modernism: Eva Hesse – Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Roni Horn – Derek Jarman (2015; in Polish), as well as over 40 academic and 100 critical texts published in exhibition catalogues, art magazines, and peer-reviewed journals and monographs. He has curated over thirty group and solo shows and art projects, including several exhibitions of Roma contemporary artists and Roma art. His research interests include queer studies, Central European art history, postcolonialism, heritage and museum studies. He was a leader and co-investigator in many research projects. He is co-curator of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).
Denisa Tomková
Denisa Tomková, PhD, is an art theorist and curator. She holds a PhD in Visual Culture from the University of Aberdeen (2019), and is the Curator of Editorial Programming at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia. Between 2015-2018, she was a member of the international research project, “Comparing WE’s. Cosmopolitanism. Emancipation. Postcoloniality”, based at the University of Lisbon. Between 2019-2021, she worked for the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin, as a research fellow, curator, and a project coordinator. Between 2021-2022, she was a Curatorial and Publications Research Fellow at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. She has published in various international art periodicals, including: Third Text, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, Camera Austria, L’Internationale Online, and ART Margins Online, among other journals.
Open Road / Phundrado Drom: Laying Foundations for the Roma and Sinti Centre in Prague
Dan Turner
Artist and educator from London, a Romani born in Kent, whose family are still based in South East London, with its many close associations with Romani culture. Turner trained at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, where he completed a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art (Sculpture). He works across media, including sculpture, video and painting. Turner’s practice explores the interaction between Romani and mainstream culture through themes of commercial interchange in Romani life. He is interested in how human life can be defined and archived through made objects, and how these objects communicate across timelines through a shared material culture, articulating that culture to a wider audience. Using transactional objects which have significance across both cultures, Turner examines how Gypsy, Roma and Traveller cultures meet and interact with the dominant culture. Working with migration maps of Roma diasporas, and using traditional crafts and occupations, such as herbalism, wooden peg and flower making, and fortune-telling, Turner re-imagines the Roma past, present and future to challenge mainstream culture’s view of Roma identities. His work, Seeds of Healing, was shown in FUTUROMA at the Venice Biennale 2019. In 2020, he exhibited at the Gypsy Maker Project in Wales, supported by the Romani Cultural and Arts Company, and at the Kai Dikhas Gallery in Berlin. His video work, Patteran, was selected for the online 50th Roma Congress Celebration Exhibition. Turner recently completed an online performance and installation commission for Meadow Arts, UK, and his film, Glamour, was shown as part of the Estuary Festival 2021, UK. Turner’s work is currently on view at the 2nd Roma Biennale in Berlin.
Alfred Ullrich
Alfred Ullrich (1948 Schwabmünchen, Germany) works with installations, video, photography, performance and prints. Member of the KVD Dachau and BBK Munich and Upper Bavaria.
RomaMoMa – The Digital Roma Museum
Krisztina Varga
PhD student at ELTE (Budapest), in the Film, Media and Cultural Studies programme, and researcher at Minor Media / Culture Research Centre. Graduated from the Art Theory Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as an Expert in Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies. In her studies, she examined questions of contemporary Roma art institutions (Institutional History of Roma Culture in Hungary, 2014; National Roma Museum in Hungary, 2016). The focus of her PhD research is on the cultural representation of minorities and the question of the Roma museum.
Critical Reflection on the RomaMoMA Initiative
Miguel Ángel Vargas
Miguel Ángel Vargas (1978, Spain) is an art historian and theatre director living and working in Spain. As an independent researcher and artist, Vargas combines Flamenco, theatre and Romani history as experienced-based themes of his artistic and academic enquiry. He has worked internationally as an actor, director, set designer, production manager and even opera technician, among other roles in the performing arts. He has collaborated with many academic institutions, including Central Saint Martin’s College of Arts of London, within their Performing Arts MA programme, the University of Seville, and Central European University in Budapest.
The Whip and the Mask – A Spanish Roma at the front of the stage
Björn Vedder
Björn Vedder, PhD, is a writer and curator at Schafhof – European Center for Art Upper Bavaria. He writes about contemporary art and philosophy. Recent publications include: Virtualität und Verlust, Freising 2021; Väter der Zukunft, Marburg 2020; Highway to the Dangerzone (Claudia Comte, FORT, Katharina Grosse, Gregor Hildebrandt, Leiko Ikemura, Anselm Reyle, Thomas Zitzwitz), Luxembourg 2020; Reicher Pöbel. Über die Monster des Kapitalismus, Marburg 2018. His writing is also published in newspapers and trade journals. Exhibitions he has curated include: Nature’s Stories (Bernd Zimmer), Freising 2020; Wuthering Heights. The Power of Emotions (AES+F, Römer&Römer, Adriane Wachholz, Thomas Zitzwitz), Freising 2018; Mumbling in Sector Zero (Via Lewandowsky), Freising 2017; Scenic Constellations. Christian Devotional Images and Contemporary Abstract Painting (Sven Drühl, Rupprecht Geiger, Alexei Jawlensky, Karl Casper, Quentin Massys, Christine Streuli), Freising 2017; In Your Face (Roland Fischer), Freising 2016.
Art and Memory – and the Future
Nina Vrbanová
Nina Vrbanová (*1986) is a curator and critic of contemporary visual art. She studied at the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (SK) and the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague (CZ). Between 2009 and 2013, she worked as curator and project manager at the Cyprián Majerník Gallery in Bratislava, and until 2014 she was editor of the journal, Rider – Print of the Contemporary Art Movement Wall Gazette. She pursued her doctoral studies in the field of aesthetics from 2010 to 2016 at the Philosophical Faculty of Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra (thesis entitled, Public Privacy: The Semiotics of Visual Phenomena). From 2012 to 2021, she was a member of the Slovak section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She worked in Kunsthalle Bratislava as a curator from 2014, and as director and chief curator from 2017 to 2020. She played a leading role in the institution of Kunsthalle Bratislava as an autonomous publicly-funded organisation of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic and was the author of the organisation’s Founding Document. In 2018, Artbase, the online database of contemporary Slovak visual art, was established on her initiative. She was a member of the Expert Commission to select a representative project for the Pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics at the 57th Venice Biennale (under the auspices of the Slovak National Gallery). As a curator, she has prepared many exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad. She is an author and editor of catalogues, essay collections and professional publications in Slovakia and abroad. With the support of the Slovak Arts Council, she is currently engaged in independent research on Models and Trends in Cultural Politics in the V4 Countries.
Blackness in the Absent Body: On the Work and Artistic Career of Emília Rigová
Joanna Warsza
Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm, and an independent curator and editor, interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cubes. In 2021, together with Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, she co-curated Die Balkone in Berlin the 3rd Autostrada Biennale in Kosovo, and the 12th Survival Kit in Riga (LV). She was the Artistic Director of Public Art Munich 2018, curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale, among others. Her recent publications include Red Love. A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (co-edited with Maria Lind and Michele Masucci; Sternberg Press, Konstfack Collections, and Tensta Konsthall, 2020), and And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There: Guest, Host, Ghost (co-edited with Sina Najafi; Cabinet Books and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2020). Back in 2012, she realised the exhibition, Project, focusing on Roma culture at Wielkopolskie Rewolucje festiwal in Konin, Poland. Originally from Warsaw, she lives in Berlin.
Monika Weychert
Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Journalism and Social Communication SAN Warsaw (collaborating with the university since 2015). Since 2016, she has also cooperated with the Institute of Public Space Research of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In Torun she ran, among others, “independent flying gallery” and “a gallery for…”; she was associated with the Foksal Gallery and the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in Królikarnia – a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw. She has curated several dozen exhibitions. Long-time collaborator of TVP Kultura; author of articles published in several scientific and critical magazines and exhibition catalogues, book editor, member of AICA.
RomaMoMA: a Roma Transnational Museum – Challenges and Issues
Unexpected Encounters: Polish Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition- La Biennale di Venezia
Christina Zetterlund
is a craft and design historian. She is a researcher and educator at Linnaeus University, as well as an independent curator. Most recently she curated, with Onkar Kular, Luleå Biennal 2022 – Craft & Art, and she is head of the initiative (Re-)learning the Archive. She was leading the research project ‘Design history in other geographies,’ writing with local and situated practices from the regions of Småland and Sápmi. A long-time student of the practice of Rosa Taikon, she collaborates with various parties, including the Hälsinglands Museum, in an ongoing attempt to create an archive of the jewellery artist and Roma human rights activist’s workshop.