Young Romani Artists . YRA22
About
Robert Czibi . Luna De Rosa . Brunn Morais . Mersud Selman . David Weiss
With YOUNG ROMANI ARTISTS 22 we present young artists of Sinti or Rroma origin from all over Europe and beyond who work in different media. They show the diversity and quality of contemporary Sinti and Rroma art. They show an art that participates in the international discourse and only rarely makes a direct reference to minority traditions. An art that uses its freedom, and in doing so calls on us to preserve this very freedom.
YOUNG ROMANI ARTISTS 22 presents the works of five international artists who deal with the currently much discussed topic of identities from their own perspective. How much of us is attribution, self-discovery or self-creation in our own artistic world? The artists confront the viewers in sensual and intelligent ways with the current questions of identity politics.
Between the reflections of the mirrors, text quotations, interactive installations and performative self-dramatisation favoured by the Brazilian artist Brunn Morais, the partly painful and partly affectionate oil portraits of the series „Don’t spit in my Face“ of the Berlin-based Bosnian painter Mersud Selman and the colourful references of the London-based Hungarian artist Robert Czibi to Rroma history in his watercolours and transfer prints. The Italian Luna de Rosa expresses in her artworks the relationship that connects the body with the social context that governs it and essentially defines it. This is followed by the charming statement of a tiger "I am a savage.“ immortalised in a colour-woodcut by the German Sinto David Weiss, where one cannot be sure whether this tiger wants to bite or just cuddle. In this way the young artists create a dazzling panopticon of identities that, in their diversity, allows us to look to the future with confidence. The blunt criticism of the hardly bearable conditions of a society that still excludes Rroma and Sinti today and makes them victims of violence and social stigmatisation becomes an artistic awakening, art a self-empowering weapon in the resistance against antiziganism. It is not without irony that the title of the exhibition takes up what is possibly the most successful marketing measure of a gallery for a group of artists: the YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS YBA around Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin et alt. of the Saatchi Gallery in London. As viewers, we participate in an artistic revolution, a self-empowerment of art that rises above centuries of exclusion and persecution in the belief of a better future. This is not the only reason why these young artists deserve the same attention and success as their British colleagues in the late 1990s.