Robert Czibi · Luna De Rosa · Brunn Morais · Mersud Selman · David Weiss
With YOUNG ROMANI ARTISTS YRA 22, the Kai Dikhas Foundation presents young artists from the minority community across Europe and beyond, working in a variety of media. They showcase the diversity and quality of contemporary Sinti and Roma art—art that participates in the international discourse and only occasionally makes direct reference to the traditions of the minority. This is art that embraces its freedom and, in doing so, calls upon us to preserve that very freedom.
YOUNG ROMANI ARTISTS YRA 22 presents the work of five international artists, each engaging from their own perspective with the much-debated theme of identity. How much of who we are is ascribed by others, how much is self-discovery, and how much is the creation of oneself within one’s own artistic world? The artists confront viewers in sensuous and intelligent ways with current questions of identity politics.
From the reflections in the mirrors favored by Brazilian artist Brunn Morais, to text quotations, interactive installations, and performative self-presentations; from the partly painful, partly affectionate oil portraits of the Don’t spit in my Face series by Berlin-based Bosnian painter Mersud Selman; and from the colorful references to Roma history in the watercolors and transfer prints of London-based Hungarian artist Robert Czibi, to the works of Italian artist Luna de Rosa, which express the relationship connecting the body with the social context that controls and essentially defines it—this exhibition is rich in variety.
German Sinto David Weiss presents his charming statement “I am a savage” through a color woodcut of a tiger, leaving viewers unsure whether this tiger intends to bite or simply cuddle. Together, these young artists create a vibrant panorama of identities, whose diversity inspires confidence in the future. Their unvarnished critique of the unbearable conditions in a society that continues to marginalize Roma and Sinti—making them victims of violence and social stigma—becomes a creative call to arms: art as a self-empowering weapon in the fight against antigypsyism.
Not without irony, the exhibition title references what was perhaps the most successful marketing move for a gallery promoting a group of artists: the YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS (YBA) of London’s Saatchi Gallery, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. As viewers, we witness an artistic revolution—a self-empowerment of art that, sustained by the belief in a better future, rises above centuries of exclusion and persecution. And for that reason alone, these young artists deserve the same attention and success as their British counterparts of the late 1990s.
