“I’m not afraid to say that I want to achieve something with this:” contemporary art as Roma activism in Budapest

Abstract

Roma experience in Hungary has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Many existing studies focus on marginalization, exclusion, socioeconomic stigma, and segregation to understand Roma as an identity category. A handful of others focus on Romani activism and resistance to the above challenges. Using postcolonial theory as a framework for explaining Romani identities, this dissertation investigates Roma contemporary art production as an activist tool in Budapest. This research took a qualitative approach to gathering and analyzing visual and textual data to uncover relationships between Roma identities, art, and activism. By examining elements in Roma contemporary visual art and interviewing experts in culture/identity, art, and activism, it united two theoretical strands to understand how contemporary art production informs, reflects, or challenges Roma identities. It identified two major approaches to Roma activism, ethnonationalist and civil, and generated an understanding of the ways identities depicted in contemporary visual art support or complicate these approaches. Analysis of the data found that contemporary visual art has been employed to communicate Romani identities in diverse, sometimes conflicting ways. These span a complete eschewal of Roma as a category within art, to a full embrace of Romani self-identity as a motif used to call attention to social issues. Artists’ and activists’ understanding of contemporary art as an activist tool often differ, but both refer to themes of decolonization, resistance, othering, diversity, and intersectionality in their work.