Curatorial projects
for more information click on the titles of the curatorial projects
The exhibition The Road is Open/Phundrado Drom is a curatorial illumination of the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture, more precisely its art collection.
The museum itself is a unique institution, the only one of its kind in the wider European context. As a young museum, which was established in 1991 in an atmosphere of new hope and social change at the initiative of the Roma themselves, it did not have time to capture many artifacts of traditional Roma culture.
However, the positive side of such a delay is a clean slate: a break from the practices of „old“ museology, including its colonial policies. MRK is a museum with a strong ethno-emancipatory ethos and an open mission. Phundrado drom combines the „great masters“ gallery format with the museum concept of the so-called open depository. The „great masters“ section presents some of the most remarkable artists with a special style and story in the author‘s collections. The object of the „open depository“ presents the activities of the museum in the full complexity of its collections.
from curatorial text by Rigová, Hanáková
Artists: Robert Gabris (AT/SK), Krzysztof Gil (PL), Sead Kazanxhiu (AL), Denis Kozerawski (SK), Delaine Le Bas (UK), Luboš Kotlár (SK), Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (PL), Tamara Moyzes (CZ/SK), Emília Rigová (SK), Selma Selman (USA/BiH).
The thematic frame of the exhibition is the Roma identity and its (self)critical reflection, or to use more academic terminology, visual discourse of Roma identity. Exhibition KERES KULTURA! / WE CREATE CULTURE! (Contemporary Art and Roma Identity) will present the work of young generation of artists, mostly but not exclusively of Roma who work with the theme, or it might be better to say IN the theme of Roma identity and they critically reflect on it. Unlike a number of exhibitions of rather idyllic-minded naive art by the Roma, we intend to present vivid, discursive, current contemporary art, which invokes the tradition, but in many ways it argues with it and is rather critical of it, too.
Professional Roma artists are now a natural part of the art scene; they may or may not identify with Roma identity just like non-Roma artists do or do not identify with different aspects of their identities. “Roma art” seems not to exist. Similarly, there is no ethnically (or essentially) Slovak art. However, there is art that critically reflects its Romacity (Slovacity), its romipen… This experience, we believe, may be more generally true and transferable.
The Roma topics and “Romacity” have been intensively discussed in the former Western countries especially in recent years as a universal metaphor of the world on the move, an experience of hostility and exclusion also in the context of the latest migration waves and chauvinistic echoes it has created. There is also an analogy between the Artist and the Roma (for example, in the common concept Bohéma), both dealing with separation, otherness, certain structural and social differences.
from curatorial text by Rigová, Hanáková
