Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros thématiques22Artelogie MondesApplying an Intersectional Lens: ...

Artelogie Mondes

Applying an Intersectional Lens: Oláh Mara OMARA and the Politics of Care.

Viktoria Popovics

Résumés

Known for her socio-critical paintings, autobiographical works dealing with personal traumas and subversive actions, Oláh Mara OMARA (1945-2020) is an internationally acknowledged Hungarian artist of Roma origin. As a self-taught artist who started painting at the age of 43, OMARA was considered a “naïve gypsy painter” until her recognition as a contemporary artist in the late 2000s. With her unconventional artistic practice, she challenged the art historical canon and pioneered the introduction of Roma resistance into contemporary art institutions. This essay seeks to examine the interrelation between social conditions and artistic production, the intersections of gender, ethnicity, social status, age, motherhood, and disability in OMARA’s art, and thus, to shed light on the manifestations of intersectional discrimination in Hungarian art and society.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 Ceija Stojka (1933 – 2013) was an Austrian Romani writer, painter, activist, musician, and survivor (...)
  • 2 “Re-enchanting the World”, Polish pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale.
  • 3 Selma Selman consciously calls herself an artist of Romani origin – instead of a Romani artist – an (...)

1In the global contemporary art scene, Roma women artists from all generations have gained visibility in recent years. Exhibitions held worldwide for the Austrian-Romani painter, and Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka1, the presentation of the Romani-Polish artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the Polish pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale2, the international career in the making of the Bosnian-born Selma Selman3 – just to mention a few indisputable achievements. However, the position of ethnic Roma artists is complicated, with an accompanying risk that their ethnic background is being used or exploited by leading institutions and high-profile recurring exhibitions in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity”. Even the term “Roma art” or “Roma artists” should be addressed, as it is easy to fall into the trap of branding artists of this heritage with the “ethno-label”. (BAHLMAN, 2011: p. 12).

2Giving Roma art adequate attention, equal treatment, and positioning artists of Roma origin in appropriate exhibition contexts has the potential to challenge cultural hegemony, highlighting structural inequalities and unveiling intersectional discrimination on all levels of art and society. These were the questions I, as a museum curator, wanted to address conceiving the group exhibition Handle with Care held at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest. 4Co-curated with museum educator Rita Dabi-Farkas, the show focused on a differentiated notion of care departing from its crisis prevalent on interpersonal, economic, political, and ecological levels. To avoid using Roma artists in an illustrative manner, our curatorial intention was to create a context through discursive programs, and with presentations by non-Roma artists who work on topics of segregation, poverty, and unequal distribution of social care services. One of the featured works was the video piece Home to You by the British visual artist and filmmaker Phil Collins, with a soundtrack by Welsh songwriter-musician Cate Le Bon.5 The work not only portrays the racial segregation in the Lunik IX district in Kosice, Slovakia – one of Europe's largest Roma slums – but also showcases a collaborative working method involving the local community. Co-produced with an independent cinema called Kino Úsmev, Collins depicts moments of dignity and joy amidst the daily struggles of the ghetto-like neighborhood. In contrast to the stereotypical representation of Roma by the media, the film emphasizes the sense of solidarity and resilience of the community. As a practical step, proceeds from Cate Le Bon's new album were donated to Kino Úsmev’s educational initiative connecting young Roma people from Lunik IX and other parts of the city.

3As the video work of Collins revealed as well, the care crisis particularly affects Roma women, mothers, caregivers, and children alike, given that they are among the most vulnerable groups and the targets of most human rights violations.

4Oláh Mara OMARA is one of the few contemporary Hungarian artists whose work directly addresses these social issues and whose presentation played a crucial role in the development of the curatorial concept. A large number of her paintings were installed – not hung in a cluster but presented as a mise en abîme (exhibition within an exhibition)inserted in different sections of the show to reflect the intersectional dimensions of care. As the critic Teodora Talhoș  emphasized in her review of the exhibition: “Entering the exhibition I was immediately taken by the hand by Oláh Mara’s (alias Omara) works, which led me through the whole space as an intersectional red thread connecting different sensitive topics such as racism (institutional or otherwise), social exclusion, and motherhood.” (TALHOS, 2024).

  • 6 The term intersectionality was introduced by feminist critical race theorist Kimberle W. Crenshaw a (...)

5This text provides a summary analysis of OMARA's art, as well as her significant role in shaping the curatorial agenda of the Handle with Care exhibition. By applying the intersectional lens6, what this article aims to demonstrate is how the intersection of gender, ethnicity, illness, and class crossed and influenced the artistic practice of Oláh Mara OMARA and how she used her “margins” as a “site of resistance” and “critical response to domination.” (HOOKS, 1989: p. 23).

  • 7 OMARA’s signature style included black sunglasses, a turban or fur hat, lingerie with a low necklin (...)

6Timea Junghaus, an art historian of Roma/Sinti origin, mentions OMARA among the Roma women artists who apply feminist strategies and whose art is organized around the question of visibility. “...once arriving at the position of visibility, her art is attempting to rewrite or modify the mainstream discourse.” (JUNGHAUS, 2018: p. 386). OMARA has not relied exclusively on visual art but also operates through actions, scandals, and interventions using media (print, electronic, television) to disseminate her view. Her art as a Gesamtkunstwerk (including her consciously designed, and often exaggerated public and media appearance 7) should be analyzed in a matrix of societal relations paying attention to how her career path developed within a discriminatory society and in an inherently elitist art scene.

Figure 1 OMARA in her apartment, photo, courtesy of OMARA Archive and Everybody Needs Art, Budapest

Belonging to an ethnic minority in Eastern Europe

7The Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Eastern Europe, are perhaps the region's most misunderstood, most persecuted, and maligned minority. Roma have suffered economic, political, and cultural discrimination throughout history at the hands of both communist and capitalist, and democratic and totalitarian societies. The post-1989 transition in Eastern Europe created a huge ethnic underclass consisting of over 5 million Roma who, according to every statistical indicator – political, social, and economic (literacy, income, life span, infant mortality, diet, representation in government, access to health care and legal aid, education, employment) – have the lowest status of any ethnic group in Eastern Europe (SILVERMAN, 2010).

8Aniko Imre argues that the changing situation of Roma minorities within Eastern Europe provides a useful lens through which we can examine how whiteness has been called upon to provide legitimacy to the post-socialist nation-state. (IMRE, 2005: p. 80).

  • 8 The Private Nationalism Project was a series of programs with exhibitions held in Prague, Košice, P (...)

9In the group exhibition, Private Nationalism8 curated by Edit András OMARA’s works represented the transnational view of the diaspora’s existence and contrasted with exclusionary ethnonationalism. One of the exhibited works, Gypsyland (2008) appealed to a critical examination of whiteness:

Figure 2 Gypsyland [Cigányország], 2008 (or 2011), oil on fiberboard, 2011, Völgyi-Skonda Contemporary Art Collection

"I would love to live in a real cohesive gypsy country!!! We could show what kind of people we are if we would not be hindered by the selfish white man.”

  • 9 The term Indians is meant here as the indigenous people of the American continent.

10The composition shows a woman figure embracing the globe with her (brown-skinned) body and observing it with a magnifying glass. The text written on the painting can be read as a contemplation on being stateless: This idiot cannot understand why he can't find his gypsy-ness on this big globe. But then where did we fall from? From the sky? Because Indians are Indians.9 And they have a country, while we do not have one”. OMARA’s practice describes the mentality of the non-Roma and at the same time the need to examine and deconstruct the majority (white) position.

The Artist as an Autoethnographer (?)

11In "Arts of the Contact Zone," Mary Louise Pratt introduces the term autoethnography, which means how "colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways to engage with the colonizer's own terms" (PRATT, 1992: p. 7). Pratt's scholarship is relevant to the study of artists of Roma origin who live on “the contact zone of cultural encounter." Contact zone, another key idea, can be summarized as social spaces where different cultures in hierarchical and asymmetrical relations meet, clash, and grapple with each other.

  • 10 After her paintings depicting dramatic scenes from her life were mistakenly entitled by euphemistic (...)
  • 11 The book "Gypsy Mothers Should Be Crowned" (2006, p.1-79) is dedicated to honoring gypsy mothers ap (...)

12The concept of autoethnography can be applied to OMARA's visual and textual practice, rooted in the lived experience of a Roma woman, an autodidact artist on the borderline of the white, able-bodied, upper-middle-class dominant perspective. From 1992 on, OMARA included texts on her paintings to avoid any misinterpretation.10 These marks and inscriptions are, on the one hand, compositional elements and, on the other hand, conceptual messages in the forms of personal testimonies, subjective confessions, vernacular viewpoints, exclamations, and flashbacks of the trauma. OMARA has also produced two written works, a memoir (Mara festőművész [Mara, painter], 1997) and a pamphlet entitled Gypsy Mothers Should Be Crowned [Cigány anyának korona jár]11, which are both rich sources for the study of Roma representation and art historical analysis of her oeuvre. Writing an autobiography as a Roma woman is a self-narration, through which she consciously constructs herself and represents a culture that had not been represented previously (or only through the viewpoint of the dominant culture). OMARA, as a subject of the minority culture, describes experiences of oppression and disadvantaged status, experiences of poverty, isolation, disrespect, and lack of access to education. Autoethnography in this sense is a collaboration of mixed ideas and values from both the dominant and subordinate cultures.

13The artist often showed herself through the perception of the majority, and as a “colonized subject” she partially appropriated “the idioms of the conqueror.” The re-appropriation of clichés and (visual) stereotypes associated with gypsy women (e.g. Gypsy Madonna, Fortune Teller, Carmen) appears to be crucial in OMARA’s artistic practice. In the image of the female gypsy (described as erotic, exotic, libidinous, seductive, lust-driven, animalistic, magical, or demonic) ethnic and gender stereotypes interlace (EULBERG, 2011: p. 64). The body of the gypsy women has especially been an object of the public gaze, this is what OMARA frequently plays with. She even takes on conflicting roles within an image, such as the role of Carmen, the erotic Femme Fatale, and the ideal Gypsy Mother. In a painting and the accompanying photography, she captured her “world famous” and “provocative” breasts exposed, but the inscription contradicts erotic connotation by revealing motherly love, care, and devotion to her child:

“So here are the provocative breasts of Omara. They irritated those who envied me so much that I became so angry, that I did not only paint but also photographed them by myself in the mirror because there was no one I could ask to take a picture of them. So why are they beautiful? Because I nursed the most beautiful girl in the world with them!!!! They are not fake boobs! The bored whores still think I am a slut. Go figure it out! You little whores, who don’t want to breastfeed, but don’t even give birth!”

Figure 3 “These-breasts-became-world-famous-for”, oil on fibreboard, 55x43 cm, 2017, Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

Figure 3 “These-breasts-became-world-famous-for”, oil on fibreboard, 55x43 cm, 2017, Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

Figure 4 “Here are Omara’s provocative breasts”, ballpoint pen on photo, 15×21 cm. Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

  • 12 For years, she earned money by making predictions on Budapest TV and Ezo TV in a unique and enterta (...)

14The most common stereotype about Roma women is connected to fertility: getting married early, giving birth at a very young age, and taking care of many children combined with premature and excessive enactment of sexuality. (EULBERG, 2011: p. 66-69.) These cliches are exaggerated in the painting entitled Motherhood, in which the woman figure appears with thick, wavy hair, full lips, her skin color contrasted by the white of her eyes and her seductive look. The infant in her hand looks much older than her age, like a mature Roma girl. By using stereotypical images of the Roma, and by reclaiming these images, OMARA challenges cultural hegemony and the often-negative attitudes of the majority towards Roma people. (TOMKOVA, 2021). Similar stereotypes are associated with one of OMARA’s most unique pieces of art, the hand-painted Tarot Cards, which – tarot card reading and “fortune-telling” – are also considered primitive practices of the magically gifted “gypsy witch.”12

Figure 5 Tarot deck, 2005-2010, print, 22 cards + 2 covers, Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

From the Roma “underclass” to the contemporary art world

“ I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle.”

bell hooks: Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, 1989

15Oláh Mara was born in the same decade (1940s) as Orshi Drozdik, Katalin Ladik, Ewa Partum, Jana Želibská or Sanja Iveković, just to mention a few significant women artists from the region of Central and Eastern Europe. However, she did not attend an art school or have any informal artistic education. Born to a Roma family in Monor, Hungary, her father was a musician, and her mother came from a traditional tinsmith family. OMARA was working primarily as a cleaning lady and only began making art in 1988 at the age of forty-three. She wrote in her diary: “My life was in such a crisis after the sudden death of my mother that I started to paint in 1988. I had strong migraines. One day I had a headache again and asked my little girl for paper and pencil because I felt I had to draw. That's when my painting started because, by the time I finished the drawing of Sophia Loren, my migraine had disappeared as if it had never existed. (OMARA, 1997: p. 39).

16Practising art as a therapeutic tool helped her to overcome her chronic headaches and the grief felt over losing her mother. On a symbolic level, through art, she was able to look beyond the extreme hardships, the difficult working, living, and health conditions from which she was unable to break free, and which had been accumulating in her family for generations. In her works, she explored her childhood traumas, her experiences as a Roma woman, and the struggles of a single mother.

17Her artistic awakening happened in 1991 when she gained legitimacy from a canon-forming art institution. According to her account, she traveled to Budapest with her painting My Surgery (1989) and asked for advice from the professionals of the Hungarian National Gallery. After receiving positive feedback and encouragement, she carried on with art. (OMARA, 1996: p. 42).

Figure 6 My Surgery, 1989, oil on fibreboard, 58 x 80 cm. Courtesy of Romano Kher, Budapest

  • 13 In their book “A Contemporary History of Exclusion. The Roma Issue in Hungary from 1945-2014", the (...)

18From this date, she started to capture her life story chronologically and retrospectively. Most of the events took place during the socialist era, and were depicted after 1989. Therefore, these works retrospectively debunked the socialist propaganda that neither gender nor racial discrimination existed in socialism.13

  • 14 The richly illustrated self-published book: OMARA (1997), Mara festőművész [Mara, painter] is struc (...)
  • 15 OMARA (1997), Mara festőművész [Mara, painter], Szolnok: self-published, p. 44-45.

19In the 90s, her oil paintings were evaluated exclusively as part of the naive art tradition and exhibited outside the canon-forming institutions, mainly in community houses, or non-art-related locations (hotels, cinemas, prisons etc.). Besides, racial and gender discrimination, which she reported on extensively in her paintings and autobiographical writings14, OMARA has long been a victim of aesthetic discrimination as well. Her oil paintings were considered as products of the naïve tradition detached from her complex artistic persona. (JUNGHAUS, 2014: p. 28). In 1993, she established the first Roma art gallery – as she called it – in her home located in the suburbs of Budapest, Kispest. The purpose of the gallery was to invite those who were interested in her art to come to her, rather than carrying the paintings to exhibitions. The apartment was also open for fellow artists and operated until it was deemed dangerous for her health.15

  • 16 This was the first time Roma artists (11 in all) could exhibit in an official contemporary art spac (...)
  • 17 The establishment of the First Roma Pavilion was the first conscious subaltern revolt of the Europe (...)
  • 18 It was the first comprehensive exhibition featuring art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s based o (...)
  • 19 ! – Omara hang-tér-foglalása [! Omara Occupies the Sound-Space], 4–29 May 2021, Kesztyűgyár Közössé (...)
  • 20 One Day We Shall Celebrate Again: RomaMoMA. RomaMoMA is a transnational, collaborative project of O (...)

20The first institutional presentation of her paintings took place in 2004 at Kunsthalle Budapest, in the group show “The Hidden Holocaust”16. It was the very first time that Roma artists had appeared on the official contemporary art scene. (DARÓCZI, 2013: p.145). Milestones in her career include the first Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007),17 participation in the international group exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe18 hosted by MUMOK, Vienna (2009), the acquisition of eight paintings from the Blue Series by the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (2012). An important curatorial approach, ! Omara Occupies the Sound-Space (2021) focused on the concept of female empowerment and moved towards the interpretation of her public speeches and performative actions.19 The main highlight happened already after her death, the participation at Documenta fifteen in Kassel (2022) among artists such as Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Selma Selman, and Ceija Stojka.20 

OMARA and the politics of care

21Care permeates almost every aspect of our social reality. It is partly in the wake of the pandemic COVID-19 that both collective and individual care has been brought into sharper focus than ever before. The global pandemic has shed light on the politics of care and has shown the heavy burden on women, vulnerable people, social workers, and the inequality in the gender distribution of care work. It has also highlighted issues relating to the role of the state, the primacy of economic interests, and the limited autonomy of the individual.

22Care and care work are historically, socially, and culturally closely linked to women and mothers’ roles. Since the 1970s, the undervaluation and unequal gender distribution of care work have been increasingly criticized. Feminist theorist Silvia Federici points to the paradox that care work, mostly done by women, contributes to the functioning of the economy but is not paid for, i.e. “labor of love” is not valued as work (FEDERICI, 2012: p.76). Issues of invisible labor and unequal distribution of care work are important parts of feminist art practices. The aquarelle portraits of female migrant workers in Poland (I am Ukrainka ) by the Ukrainian feminist artist Oksana Briukhovetska, the video work The Invisible Women of the Erste Campus by Sanja Iveković, and the oil paintings processing the female experience of the war by Ekaterina Lisovenko (Evening in Ukraine; Kindergarten) put OMARA in a global feminist context within the exhibition Handle with Care. Namely, the issues addressed by these artists exhibited together (marginalization, social segregation, gender inequality, care migration, and the trauma of the war) are part of the same oppressive power structure. In addition to this, their common ground is the struggle against patriarchal practices such as sexism, gender-based violence, economic and ethnic discrimination.

Figure 7 Exhibition view Handle with Care with works of Ekaterina Lisovenko, Oksana Briukhovetska and Oláh Mara OMARA Photo: József Rosta

  • 21 Various sociological research has shown that Roma in Hungary suffer substantial disadvantages in al (...)

23The very essence of caring presupposes a power relationship, a subordination between caregivers and cared-for, individuals and the state, which can easily turn into an exercise of control. However, there is also an intersectional dimension of care, the complex interplay of multiple, cumulative discriminations, which is evident in OMARA’s case. OMARA had gone from being a cleaning lady (!) to a contemporary artist who experienced for herself the discriminatory treatment of the institutions of care. 21

24The notions of care and non-care influenced and determined her whole life from early childhood till her sudden death in a hospital in 2020. At a young age, she became the primary caregiver of her siblings after her mother’s illness. The caring responsibilities prevented her from attending school and was only able to finish her primary education after her marriage. Without a graduation certificate, she could undertake casual physical work (she worked in agriculture, in a rubber factory, in housekeeping, etc.). Several paintings deal with experiences with mainly male representatives of different institutions (doctors, school directors, teachers, policemen, mayors, councilors).

25During her lifetime, she suffered from several serious illnesses and her left eye had to be removed due to cancer. Poverty, poor living and working conditions, and the struggle for fair housing characterized her entire life. In her old age, she lived in a self-built house in the countryside near Budapest (Szarvasgede), which she was very proud of and called a luxury shack.

Figure 8 OMARA in front of her self-build hause. Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

26OMARA depicted the stark realities of poverty and class inequality present in Hungarian society. Her living conditions, self-built house, themes of poverty, hunger and the struggles of the underclass were recurring themes in her paintings. According to Ethel Brooks, the first tenured Romani woman scholar, the sense of the home for Roma women is a shelter, a place of survival, of care, and is not based on private but public poverty, and on "intergenerational formations of love" (BROOKS, 2022: p.112). Besides the multiple differences and exclusions (economic, age-related, racial, and gender), the idea of the “communal forms of living” is expressed in the painting Guesthouse for Gypsy Women on Small Pensions (2003).

Figure 9 Guesthouse for Gypsy Women with a Small Pension (2003), 2007, 2010, oil on fibreboard, Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art & Longtermhandstand, Budapest

  • 22 Silvia Federici, in her essay “On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism” criticizes the pension (...)

27This time she does not only criticize the shortcomings of the pension system but envisages “communal forms of living ”based upon solidarity contracts” (FEDERICI, 2009 p. 253) as a solution for old age poverty, which has a woman’s face (OMARA’s utopian vision), the idea of collective care practices is a strong statement in contemporary Hungary, where the minimum pension was 28 000 HUF (ca. 70 Euro).22

28In her autobiographical book, OMARA dedicates a whole chapter to the healthcare system listing her issues with different doctors. She confesses how she faced the so-called “white-coat power” because of several diseases. In a small painting made on fiberboard, she outlined her very first and determining experience of the healthcare system, a forced gynecological examination (Virgo (1963)). As the text on the painting reveals, at the age of 18, while working at a rubber factory, she was accused of having a sexual affair with her boss. It was her father who forced her to undergo an examination to prove that she was a virgin and that the slander was false. The work Otology and its inscription describe the sexually abusive treatment by an ear doctor, who asked her to dress up for the examination. The white medical coat worn by the representatives of the healthcare institutions is a symbol of power and hierarchy, but also of humiliation and aggression.

Figure 10 Otology, 78 x 59 cm, oil on fibreboard, Courtesy of Romano Kher, Budapest

29Known from her memoir that after several years of chronic menstrual pain and a long ordeal with doctors (untreated endometriosis), a uterine tumor was finally removed. She did not attribute the success of the surgical procedure, or the relief from pain, to the doctors, but to God and love. Just like her pregnancy and the ability to give birth to her one and only daughter. In the painting Birth (1967) we see her birth in a hospital transformed into a transcendental Holy Family scene with the inscription “My only diamond, God fulfilled my desire”. The woman figure (Holy Mary) dominates the composition sitting in a birthing chair while receiving the long-awaited female infant (larger than life, like Christ as an old man in religious iconography), and the doctor wearing a mask (Josef) is just assisting in the background. Motherhood was a determining, life-changing experience for her, as she obsessively painted hundreds of portraits and often intimate stories from her daughter’s private life.

Figure 11 Birth (1967), oil on fibreboard, Museum of Ethnography, Budapest

  • 23 Since 2015, Hungarian families can apply for a grant of 10 million forints, the equivalent of EUR 2 (...)

30In the conservative climate of contemporary Hungary, Roma women appear in public discourse as giving birth to too many children to access social benefits. Framing Roma mothers as irresponsible has been central in constructing Roma as “others,” and as undeserving citizens. OMARA's paintings frequently comment on political events and state measures on reproduction. In one of her last drawings, OMARA expresses her indignation about the Government's family housing benefit (called CSOK)23

Figure 12 To Give Birth for Money?, 2020, oil on fibreboard, courtesy of Everybody Needs Art & Longtermhandstand, Budapest

31Institutional discrimination is examined in the context of school segregation. In her painting Mara in First Grade (1952) we see physical abuse and verbal aggression from the teacher as early as the first grade of elementary school. (“But if she doesn’t tolerate it, she’ll end up in a reform school, like other gypsy kids.”)

Figure 13 Little Mara in First Grade, 1952. 1998. Oil on fiberboard, 49 x 70 cm. Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. Photo: József Rosta

32Considering this early negative experience of the education system, the painting Nursery School (1971) where her daughter is the victim, is much more shocking. In this picture, the mother's guilt emerges as well: she leaves her little daughter in the prison-like institution, even knowing that she will be mistreated. The painting Immediate Litigation (1974) presents an event that happened in 1974 when OMARA initiated disciplinary proceedings against a teacher who discriminated against her daughter. Painted in various tones of blue and complemented with textual explanations, the blue pictures are confessions about the artist's most shocking traumas.

33A paradigmatic example of the asymmetrical relationship with the authorities is Mara and the Policeman (1972): the story of young Mara, who refused to stand with her bicycle behind a police officer in the queue waiting at the railway crossing because she had arrived earlier; despite there being several eyewitnesses, the policeman almost beat her to death. Another painting demonstrates negative discrimination in police practices related to identity checks. She is reenacting a scene when she was standing in front of two policemen and dared to ask how "a 70-year-old Gypsy woman could be labeled homeless”.

34After losing her left eye, she lived with an ocular prosthesis (artificial eyeball), which she often used to shock, surprise, and draw attention to herself. In public she usually wore black sunglasses, which became a means of hiding her disability but at the same time a trademark of her artistic appearance. However, disability as a category of identity is often omitted from rhetoric about intersectionality, which usually considers race and gender. One of her paintings captures a legendary spontaneous happening, when she put her glass eye in the hands of the influential Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros, during the opening of the First Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial.

Figure 14 “May my Gypsy God bless you . . .” , 2017, oil on fiberboard, 36 x 26 cm. Courtesy Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest

35OMARA's strong commitment to the community, towards fellows in need, and those in vulnerable situations was manifest in self-organized exhibitions at a youth prison in Tököl (1996) and in Szolnok (1998).24 As one of them, a "gypsy mother", she gave an enthusiastic talk to her "sons", to young Roma inmates about how to avoid crime and get back on the right track. As a loud advocate, she fought with all possible tools (public statements, speeches held at openings, media appearances) to change the anti-Romani sentiment of "gypsy crime”. She also exhibited in a secondary school supported by the Tiszadob Children’s Village, an institution raising mainly Roma orphans.

Closing remarks

36In feminist postcolonial theory, epistemic violence is “the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” (SPIVAK, 1988, p. 280.) which exists because the colonial subject is not allowed to speak up and theorize their own experience. Symbolic violence occurs when the reproduction of societal inequalities is not questioned or acted upon. Angéla Kóczé, a prominent Hungarian Roma scholar argues that Romani people face all possible forms of violence – physical, symbolic, epistemic – as a consequence of persistent and deeply embedded anti-Gypsyism within European cultural enclaves. (KÓCZÉ & TREHAN, 2009, p. 51).

37OMARA not only shows physical violence through her paintings but also resists epistemic and symbolic violence through her canon-breaking works of art and her unclassifiable position within the Hungarian art scene. The working conditions of the artist – paid, unpaid, reproductive, physical, and artistic – not only impacted the artist's career but significantly formed her radical position and contributed to OMARA's empowering art. Her unusual and uneasy career path sensitively demonstrates what it means to belong to a minority group, and how a Roma woman artist can prevail in the inherently elitist, exclusionary, and undemocratic art world. Her scattered oeuvre, the lack of a comprehensive catalog of her work, and a thus far missing retrospective exhibition point out the urgent need to integrate a more equitable and intersectional approach to the canon of Hungarian contemporary art.

38OMARA's life and artistic oeuvre can be interpreted as a sharp social critic addressing unequal labor relations and multiple marginalizations, holding a mirror up both to the social majority and to the elitist art world. OMARA's paintings with texts, her public statements, and her memoirs constitute a public outcry in post-2010 Hungary. In the official (pro-natalist) political rhetoric, women’s labor and care work has been sentimentalized and the social policies of the current “carefare" regime (FODOR,2022) ) exclude the most vulnerable groups. OMARA's practice is a politically conscious, activist art and rebellion against the discrimination of Roma mothers and caregivers, and against the growing inequalities and social disintegration of Hungarian society.

39“…artists who center ethnic Roma complicate and expand what it might mean to make socially engaged art, with the added – and ceaseless – expectation to repair our divided worlds.” (TUMBAS, 2023, p: 13) Resistance is often discussed concerning her artistic practice (MOLNÁR, 2023), as she rebelled against and resisted dominant power structures. Besides the well-established notion of Resistance, this paper asserts that the Politics of Care is an equally dominant concept for understanding OMARA’s outstanding works of art. Nevertheless, being a “subaltern” herself who consciously dominated her representation, she was concerned about those who lack care (e.g. gypsy mothers, juvenile prisoners, retired women) using art as a tool to strengthen solidarity, propose better, often utopian solutions to repair our unequally divided world.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

BAHLMAN, L. (2011), “Introduction,” in Reconsidering Roma: Aspects of Roma and Sinti Life in Contemporary Art, Göttingen, 11–15.

BROOKS, E.C. (2022), “What Is Re-enchantment? Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and the Palace of Our Dreams”, in Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: Re-enchanting the World, Warsaw,109–1 24.

BROOKS, E.C. (2012), "The Possibilities of Romani Feminism," in Signs 38, no. 1: 1–1 1.

CRENSHAW, K.W. (1991), ”Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Stanford Law Review 43, 1241—1299.

DARÓCZI, Á. (2013), “The Birth of Roma Visual Arts Hungary, 1979”, in Baker, D. & Hlavajova, M.(eds), WE Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, BAK, Utrecht, p. 140–1 51.

EULBERG, R. (2011), “The Image of the ‘Female Gypsy’ as a Potentiation of Stereotypes. Notes on the Interrelation of Gender and Ethnicity”, in Bahlmann, L./Reichelt M, (eds.), Reconsidering Roma. Aspects of Roma and Sinti Life in Contemporary Art, Göttingen, 63–77.

FEDERICI, S. (2012),” On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism (2009)”, in Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.

FEDERICI, S. (2012),” Wages against housework (1975)”, in Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.

FODOR É. (2022), More Babies for the State: The “Carefare” Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary. New Labor Forum, 31(1), 34–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960211062460

HOOKS, b. (1989), “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness,” in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, 15-23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111660; accessed 11 December 2023.

IMRE, A. (2005), “Whiteness in post-socialist Eastern Europe: the time of the Gypsies, the end of race”, in A.J. López (ed), Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp 79–102. 

JUNGHAUS, T. (2014), “Roma art: Theory and practice”, in Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 59(1), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1556/aethn.59

JUNGHAUS, T. (2018), “Our Beloved Margins: The Imagining of the Roma Transformative Subject and Art History Scholarship in Central Europe,” in Janevski A., Marcoci R. Eds., Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. New York: MoMA, 386.

KÓCZÉ, A. & TREHAN, N. (2009), ”Racism,(neo-) colonialism, and social justice: the struggle for the soul of the Romani movement in post-socialist Europe” in: Racism Postcolonialism Europe DOI: 10.5949/liverpool/9781846312199.003.0004

MAJTÉNYI, B. & MAJTÉNYI, Gy. (2016), A Contemporary History of Exclusion

The Roma Issue in Hungary from 1945 to 2015, CEU Press.

MILEVSKA, S. (2020), “Transindividuality and Difference. On Aporias of Intersectionality,” in Springerin, Issue 1/2020, accessed 10 January 2024.

MOLNÁR, V. ( 2023, January), Disrupting the Institution through Language and Enactment: Omara’s Resistance, Disrupting the Institution through Language and Enactment: Omara’s Resistancepost (moma.org), accessed 25 January 2024.

OMARA (1997), Mara festőművész [Mara, painter], Szolnok: self-published.

OMARA (2006), A cigány anyának korona jár! [Gypsy mothers should be crowned] self-published.

PRATT, M. L. (1991), Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession, 33–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469

PRATT, M. L. (2008 [1992]), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, London – New York.

SILVERMAN, C. (2010, March), “Persecution and Politicization: Roma (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe”, in Cultural Survival 19(2):43- 49, special issue on Eastern Europe, ed. Loring Danforth. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/persecution-and-politicization-roma-gypsies-eastern-europe; accessed 11 Dec 2023.

TALHOȘ, T. (2024, February), Caring About Each Other in Times of Unrest and Violence, Caring About Each Other in Times of Unrest and ViolenceBLOK MAGAZINE BLOK MAGAZINE, accessed 25 of February 2024.

TOMKOVA, D. (2021, April), “Romani Feminism in Works of Female Roma Artists,” Secondary Archive, Romani Feminism in Works of Female Roma ArtistsSecondary Archive; accessed 26 January 2024.

TUMBAS, J. (2023, March), "The Complicated Position of Ethnic Roma in Art and Culture Today," in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 86, no. 1, 2–1 4.

https://doi.org/10.1515/ZKG-2023-1003 

Haut de page

Notes

1 Ceija Stojka (1933 – 2013) was an Austrian Romani writer, painter, activist, musician, and survivor of the Holocaust. As a self-taught artist, she is among the first Roma female survivors to account for her experience in the death camps.

2 “Re-enchanting the World”, Polish pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale.

3 Selma Selman consciously calls herself an artist of Romani origin – instead of a Romani artist – and gains inspiration from collective identity and culture. 

4 Handle with Care, 14.09.2023 – 15.01.2024, Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, curators: Rita Dabi-Farkas, Viktoria Popovics). The exhibition won the award for BEST CURATORIAL PROJECT of 2023 by AICA Hungary.  Handle with care | Ludwig Museum

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Xsu1q3cAw The video for “Home To You” was made in Košice, Slovakia in collaboration with residents of Lunik IX neighbourhood. It was directed by visual artist and filmmaker Phil Collins, who had previously worked in the city in 2013, and is co-produced with Kino Úsmev.

6 The term intersectionality was introduced by feminist critical race theorist Kimberle W. Crenshaw as "a concept often used in critical theories to describe how oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another.” See: CRENSHAW, W. K., ”Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241—1299;

7 OMARA’s signature style included black sunglasses, a turban or fur hat, lingerie with a low neckline, and cigarettes. For exhibition openings, she often arrived by taxi, preferably a white Mercedes, and paid for the ride with a painting.

8 The Private Nationalism Project was a series of programs with exhibitions held in Prague, Košice, Pécs, Cracow, and Bratislava. Based on Edit András’ comprehensive curatorial concept the closing exhibition was on view at the Budapest Gallery and the Kiscell Museum – Municipal Gallery in Hungary. The exhibition entitled Imagined Communities, Personal Imaginations

showcased works by 39 artists who addressed questions of imagination concerning the nation, phases in the formation of national identities, and the issues raised by nationalism. Budapest Galéria | Private Nationalism Budapest (budapestgaleria.hu)

9 The term Indians is meant here as the indigenous people of the American continent.

10 After her paintings depicting dramatic scenes from her life were mistakenly entitled by euphemistic terms, she was outraged and started to inscribe her works with explanatory texts.

11 The book "Gypsy Mothers Should Be Crowned" (2006, p.1-79) is dedicated to honoring gypsy mothers appealing to the uniqueness of the Roma family traditions and particularly the extraordinary value of women caring about children. On the pages full of exclamation and question marks she speaks with enormous vehemence to her imaginary "white" reader, lists the criminal records of the Hungarian majority society, and confronts discrimination and humiliation.

12 For years, she earned money by making predictions on Budapest TV and Ezo TV in a unique and entertaining manner. As she read cards and interpreted the dreams of the callers, she also shared intimate insights about her life and shocked the viewers with her artistic statements. Some of the broadcasts are available on youtube.

13 In their book “A Contemporary History of Exclusion. The Roma Issue in Hungary from 1945-2014", the authors give a complex historical, social, and political analysis of the changing situation, of the constant negative assessment of the Roma population in Hungary (MAJTÉNYI & MAJTÉNYI, 2016). The book provides a chronological, profoundly structured overview of how social policies (wage work, housing, education, aid, segregation) were changing according to the ideological conceptions of the time.

14 The richly illustrated self-published book: OMARA (1997), Mara festőművész [Mara, painter] is structured in chapters about love, health issues, housing troubles and about the role of art in her life, but also reports on experiences with the doctors and the police.

15 OMARA (1997), Mara festőművész [Mara, painter], Szolnok: self-published, p. 44-45.

16 This was the first time Roma artists (11 in all) could exhibit in an official contemporary art space and use the institution’s infrastructure to complete their work.

17 The establishment of the First Roma Pavilion was the first conscious subaltern revolt of the European Roma intelligentsia, where Roma theoreticians and artists proved that it is in the field of the visual where the Roma subalternity – this burden of being the 'other', and the physical, symbolic, epistemic and, in other words, violence,, the colonizing act of European majorities toward the Roma – is the most evident (JUNGHAUS, 2014: p.33 ). See also Linking Art Worlds | Paradise Lost – The First Roma Pavilion: A Retrospective Look

18 It was the first comprehensive exhibition featuring art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s based on the theme of gender roles.

19 ! – Omara hang-tér-foglalása [! Omara Occupies the Sound-Space], 4–29 May 2021, Kesztyűgyár Közösségi Ház, Budapest, curator: Andrea Pócsik. See https://offbiennale.hu/en/%7Byear%7D/program/1-program-romamoma.

20 One Day We Shall Celebrate Again: RomaMoMA. RomaMoMA is a transnational, collaborative project of OFF-Biennále Budapest and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

21 Various sociological research has shown that Roma in Hungary suffer substantial disadvantages in all areas of their daily life. Access to healthcare, education, employment, social services, and housing is neglected as a human rights issue by most actors, including the government.

22 Silvia Federici, in her essay “On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism” criticizes the pension system, which also refers to the Hungarian situation, especially to Roma women: “ Pensions are not available to all workers, but only to those who have done paid work and certainly not to unpaid family caregivers. As reproductive work is not recognized as work and the pension systems compute benefits on the basis of the years spent in waged employment…”

23 Since 2015, Hungarian families can apply for a grant of 10 million forints, the equivalent of EUR 24 000 (which does not have to be repaid), and another 15 million forints in subsidized loans, which can be spent on buying or building a new house if they agree to have 3 or more children. The conditions include employment and marriage. With this, the Government has realized selective pronatalism, which means the most vulnerable are excluded from these social benefits and mostly the (upper)-middle classes that are encouraged to bear children. See FODOR É., (2022), More Babies for the State: The “Carefare” Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary. New Labor Forum, 31(1), 34–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960211062460

24 OMARA exhibits and talks in the prison in Tököl, posted April 27, 2017, OMARA, OLÁH MARA KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZ BÖRTÖNBEN KIÁLLÍT ÉS BESZÉL (youtube.com)

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 44k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 171k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 168k
Titre Figure 3 “These-breasts-became-world-famous-for”, oil on fibreboard, 55x43 cm, 2017, Courtesy of Everybody Needs Art and Longtermhandstand, Budapest
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 327k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 438k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 53k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 90k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-8.png
Fichier image/png, 1,6M
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 640k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 95k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 522k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 673k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 225k
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15887/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,0M
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Viktoria Popovics, « Applying an Intersectional Lens: Oláh Mara OMARA and the Politics of Care. »Artelogie [En ligne], 22 | 2024, mis en ligne le 13 décembre 2024, consulté le 11 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/15887 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12wvd

Haut de page

Auteur

Viktoria Popovics

Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search