Exhibition - and Educational Program
Gallery Kai Dikhas on Prinzenstr 84.2.
Opening: August 2, 2015 5 p. m.
Opening Speech: Tímea Junghaus and Moritz Pankok
“Transmitting Trauma?” is a collaborative exhibition and arts education initiative between Gallery8 (Budapest) and Gallery Kai Dikhas (Berlin). The exhibition is connected – both physically and symbolically – with the memorial performance “Phagedo Dschi - Zerrissenes Herz - Torn Heart" and the commemoration taking place at the Memorial for Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism.
Artists:
Selma Selman (BiH), David Weiss (DE), George Vasilescu (RO), Manolo Gómez Romero (ES), André Jenő Raatzsch (DE-HU), Kálmán Várady (DE), Valérie Leray (DE-FR), Erika Lakatos (HU), Tamara Moyzes (CZ), Lada Gaziova (SK), Delaine Le Bas (UK), Omara (HU)
Previously unknown works from the Dark Cycle of Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka (1933 -2013) are presented.
The exhibition is complemented by an extensive archival research into the stereotypes and representations of Roma, through the photographs of Miklós Déri.
The exhibition invites contemporary artists to reflect upon the memory of the Roma Holocaust. The artistic statements and works confront the Roma past and its relation to the stereotyping, scapegoating and anti-gypsyism of our present. Writing into the narrative of the past by recounting Roma (his)stories serves as an inherently emancipatory act for the artists, who further demonstrate the importance of transmitting the memory in order to build dignity, pride and hope in the future.
Intellectual and psychological legacies of the Roma Holocaust are passed on between different generations. Fear is omnipresent as a result of social exclusion, stereotyping, scapegoating and anti-gypsy violence. Surviving generations carry and carry on the memory of the trauma(s) through conscious efforts in the field of knowledge production, through epistemic interventions, through artistic and individual recollections in art and the performativity of everyday life.
By re-learning the long-oppressed and unwritten history and scientific genealogy of the Roma Holocaust, and presenting it in the context of present-day anti-gypsyism (through contemporary art), we remind the next generations that history is an open-ended process, in which Roma have the capacity to question and unlearn oppressive mechanisms in order to construct a more hopeful future.
The exhibition is on view between August 2 and August 22, 2015.
Curator: Tímea Junghaus, Moritz Pankok
Consultants: PhD Éva Judit Kovács, PhD Anna Szász
Sponsors: Koch Stiftung, Norway Grants
Collaborators: Amaro Drom
Special thanks: Lívia Marschall, Ágota Szilágyi K.
[1] a collaboration between Dotschy Reinhardt, Moritz Pankok and Sinti and Roma performers