![]() īoth exhibitions ( ! Omara Occupies the Sound-Space, and Collectively Carried Out), as well as the installation of Norbert Oláh ( Anxiety of the Roma Artist), with the performance of Independent Theatre ( Frogtales), were curated with the intention of triggering future actions, and not to present a – largely – irretrievable past. This prompted me to not only recall, but also analyse the process of our joint programme at OFF-Biennale Budapest 2021, entitled RomaMoMA, curated by Anna Lujza Szász. Photos: Ákos Keppel / BTM, Andrea Pócsik. Apart from that, the title of the exhibition and its content (with the texts placed at the back of the wooden construction, which also had a “photo-point” up a flight of stairs, offering visitors a vantage point to photograph from, at the same level as the tableau) astonished me most. But the most beautiful and telling one was undoubtedly created by Tamás Kaszás with his installation of the four pieces of Tamás Péli’s tableau with gaps between them. ![]() In over a decade of work spent in the field of Romani studies, cultural research, and curating, I have found a huge number of gaps. For a non-Roma, working together with people of Roma descent requires constant self-reflexivity: gender, social status, education, living conditions, and intellectual sensitivity produce intersecting gaps of unknowing. Education is the most obvious connected field, and it is now evident that contemporary art also employs approaches of collaboration and participation for similar purposes. In the field of art and culture, it is not so simple to find tools “to alleviate” pain, inequality, discrimination, stigmatisation, or victimisation. Psychologist Joseph Jastrow’s experiment on optical illusion. If we are just voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. ![]() The speed with which we switch from one to the other speaks to our attitude toward Roma and art – our attitude toward others. Similarly to that established psychological experiment of the optical illusion of the duck or the rabbit. Standing before the Péli tableau, we can see either the gaps or the scenes. Sontag names different approaches to the pain of others: the active agents, “who could do something”, the passive ones, who “learn from it”, and the voyeurs, without any of these attributes. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who would learn from it. My professional response was the understanding of the feedback given to the installation: the feelings and thoughts repeated ad infinitum about social distance between the Roma and non-Roma populations, and the somewhat self-incriminating responsibility about it, the metaphor of which the writer found as the key motif of the Tamás Kaszás installation: the gap.Īfter Gábor Németh’s talk, I remembered the words of Susan Sontag, who wrote about images of suffering, “regarding the pain of others”: My personal response to his interpretation was, I am ashamed to say, simply boredom. Shortly after closing the Mara Oláh exhibition at the Glove Factory Community House (Kesztyűgyár Közösségi Ház), I went to see the exhibition in the framework of a programme in which a white male writer, Gábor Németh read his text as a guide for visitors to the exhibition. ![]() OFF-Biennale Budapest was about to end in late April, when one of its most prestigious and yet under-recognised artworks, Péli Tamás’s Birth arrived in Budapest, to the Budapest History Museum in the Castle.
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