Dan Turner, Woven Strength, Inhabited Space, 2025
Dan Turner, Woven Strength, Inhabited Space, plants and mixed media, 2025
Spend some time among these precious herbs, heal your soul, listen to the wisdom they are here to offer and then visit our gallery across the street. Discover the exhibition HOLDING GROUND: Crafting New Paths in a Changing World
We are the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) at Reinhardtstraße 41-43. ERIAC is a sister organization for the 13th Berlin Biennale.
The collaboration between the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and ERIAC emerges from a shared dedication to artistic practices that challenge erasure and amplify the voices of those historically pushed to the margins. Curators Zasha Colah and Timea Junghaus bring together intersecting perspectives that explore resilience not as a passive state, but as a transformative force – an insistence on survival through creativity, restoration, and reimagining. This exhibition is a dialogue between histories of endurance and contemporary gestures of repair, forging new solidarities across artistic, ecological, and social landscapes.
The exhibition is on view from June 13 – September 15, 2025.
“Plants are vital to almost every aspect of our daily lives. They provide us with food, fibres, medicines, fuel, shelter, clothing and the air we breathe. Many animal species are also directly dependent on plants for their survival. Plants are essential constituents of ecosystems and play a key role in the Earth’s system. It is estimated 50,000-70,000 plant species are used in medicines throughout the world. They make an essential contribution to healthcare and still provide an important source of income in some rural areas.
Europe’s Roma, like it’s plants have been facing an ever-increasing range of threats, from displacement, lack of habitat, (places to stop or live) and are constantly vulnerable to changes in the economic and social environment. Roma lives are lived in the tension between moments of erasure and hyper-visibility. This jumping from invisibility to exposure in the media (and never in a positive way), creates a cycle.
The idea of erasure/hyper-visibility does not only relate to the Romani/Roma community but in fact the cycle of erasure/hyper-visibility puts Romani/Roma into what is happening in a much wider context to working, minority and migrant communities all over the world.
In my research I looked at the history of Travelling peoples as healers.
I discovered a wide range of wild medicinal plants that would be available to Roma travelling across Europe. Many thousands of wild plants have considerable economic and cultural importance and potential, providing food, fuel, clothing, shelter and medicine.
The work in which living plants and screens create a futuristic vision of travellers lives, portraying new ways of looking at these issues, is an attempt to establish dialogue and alter entrenched attitudes, and lead to a re-examination of Roma lives, past and present. To reopen dialogue on how historically, Romani people were respected for the skills they brought to the communities they visited or lived within and the to break the seeming impossibility of escaping the cycle of erasure and hyper-visibility. Cures and growth bring optimism for the future.
I also see the use of flowers and seeds as patteran*, signs, to mark where we have been and where we are going. Plants grow slowly and seed, are self-renewing, I see them as a metaphor for the Roma diaspora, how we established ourselves in bare earth, growing in this new ground, re-imagining it’s landscapes.
Note. *leaf in Romanes. But also a sign which lets other Roma know you have been here and indicate where you are going”
Dan Turner
Dan Turner is a London-based Romani artist whose work bridges tradition and contemporary life. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, his practice spans sculpture, video, painting, and text, often rooted in Romani cultural knowledge—peg-making, herbalism, and oral storytelling. His piece “Seeds of Change,” featured in ERIAC’s FUTUROMA (curated by Daniel Baker) at Venice Biennale 2019, reflects his deep commitment to community and craft. Turner’s work has been exhibited across Europe, including the 2nd Roma Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, and he continues to create and teach from his base in South East London.
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