G O S S I P S
Luna De Rosa | Dariya Kanti | Nataliia Tomenko | Marina Rosselle
8 April – 31 August 2022
On view in the ERIAC gallery:
Location: Reinhardtstraße 41-43, 10117 Berlin
Opening hours: Monday to Friday 10-17h
OPENING EVENT: 7 April 2022 17h
Location: Reinhardtstraße 41-43, 10117 Berlin
Luna De Rosa: Romnjadigitalised, 2021, collage, oil painting, 47x57cm
G O S S I P S
On the occasion of the International Romani Day (8 April), ERIAC is hosting three young and upcoming artists representing contemporary Roma woman’s art in the exhibition GOSSIPS.
In a collaboration between ERIAC and Villa Romana (Florence, Italy), two artistic residencies are offered to the winners of a public competition. In 2022, Dariya Kanti (1991, lives and works in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) and Luna De Rosa (1991, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) are the young Roma talents chosen for this residency. Featuring the two awardees and Nataliia Tomenko (1994, fled from Kremenchuk, Ukraine and currently living and working in Vienna, Austria), artist in residence for ERIAC in 2021, the exhibition welds together three artistic positions that bring together notions of Roma identity, feminist strategy and ecology while staying true to their specific aesthetics and methodologies.
Dariya Kanti’s surreal, captivating and carefully crafted imagery unfolds into emanating and symbolic icons. They become catalysts for speculative story-telling, referencing oral history and its mode of transmission as an important part of Roma culture as well as creating a specific time-space configuration that allows her to speculate on the future and to develop feminist narratives on womanhood and ecology.
Luna De Rosa’s work explores questions of Roma identity and womanhood and the politics and poetics of its visual representation. She creates stunning and dense images that almost metaphorically follow the friction and clashing realities of ideas connected to being an artist, Roma and a woman in search of a mode of existing in the in-between, of being multiple, of staying irreducible.
Nataliia Tomenko captures the daily life of a Ukrainian Romni (young Roma woman) virtuously using various graphic and printmaking techniques. In linocuts and ink drawings, she creates visual vocabularies that connect to expressions in the Romani language and thereby process and transform key aspects of Roma politics and identity.
It is in borrowing feminist historian Silvia Federici’s reading of the word gossip that these three voices tune in together and resist and build worlds effectively: “In early modern England, the word ‘gossip’ referred to companions in childbirth not limited to the midwife. It also became a term for women’s friends, with no necessary derogatory connotations. In either case, it had strong emotional connotations.”[1]
[1]Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018), 35-36.
Text by Timea Junghaus and Marc N Hörler
💙💛 Together with the transnational Roma movement, ERIAC stands in solidarity with Roma in Ukraine and Ukrainian Roma refugees. Join our campaign to support our brothers and sisters: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-the-brave-people-of-ukraine.
Inspiring speech from Nataliia Tomenko on the exhibition opening:
Dariya Kanti: Nightingale, 2019, pencil on paper, 70×80 cm
Nataliia Tomenko: Wedding ceremony, 2013, linocut, 13×21 cm
Luna De Rosa (1991, Italy), is an Italian activist and conceptual artist from the Roma diaspora who works and lives between Berlin and Milan. She holds a master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan.The body is the starting point of her artistic work – through interventions in the public sphere she expresses the relationship that connects the body with the social context that governs it and essentially defines it. In recent years, her artistic work has been focusing on the vulnerability of ethnic minorities, in particular of the Roma, who are strongly affected by exclusion and racism. Through the use of different media, ranging from performance, painting and installation, she addresses the urgency of openly defying the misunderstandings, stereotypes and representing the multiple identities of the Roma cultural and psychological heritage.In 2022 she was selected for the artist residency at Villa Romana, Florence. @lunaderosa_
Dariya Kanti (1991, Uzbekistan) studied at the National Institute of Arts and Design K. Behzod (Tashkent) in the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Department of Easel and Book Graphics, and then at the St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design in the Faculty of Monumental – Decorative Art, at the Department of Art Textiles (2012-18), where she received the red diploma and certificate for Best Senior Project of 2018.Kanti has participated in municipal, regional and international exhibitions. Since 2018, her work has been published in such international art publications as Voice of Artists (Issue 10, Artit Publisher & Online Art Gallery, London), and Negromundo magazine (Spain), among others. @dariyakanti
Nataliia Tomenko (1994, Ukraine) is an artist and Roma activist. She completed her MA in Cultural Heritage Studies: Academic Research, Policy, and Management at Central European University in Vienna. She additionally holds an MA in Graphic Design from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Currently, she is working at ERIAC: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture as an intern, engaged with a range of responsibilities in programing and administration. In parallel, she is working as a board member and a Creative Director at ARCA: Agency for the Advocacy of Roma Culture in Ukraine. Tomenko is also a National Volunteers Coordinator and Roma Rights Defender at the European Roma Rights Centre in Ukraine on a volunteer basis, with the aim of supporting the principal’s work in defending the human rights of Romani people across Europe and fighting against digital anti-Gypsyism. In the meantime, she engages with the visual representation of Roma history and culture, in the framework of art projects connected to Roma cultural heritage and Roma Genocide. @natalitomenko
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