In this essay, Veronika Molnar writes about the Hungarian Roma artist Omara (1945-2020) whose diverse practice challenged the status quo of Hungary’s contemporary art scene. The essay also highlights the importance of the RomaMoMA project, which offers a transnational approach to presenting and contextualizing the works of Roma artists inside and outside the framework of established art organizations.

I paint the story of my life and my opinion about the world

If you frown: do it after me . . .

But your eye be removed as well—and you be a gypsy . . .

Be deeply humiliated everywhere you go from childhood to this day

Otherwise, I’m not interested in your opinion . . .

—Omara, “If you have taken the time to see Omara’s scribbles,” 2011

It took a simple gesture for Omara (Oláh Mara, 1945–2020) to transcend the category of “naive gypsy painter,” as she liked to call herself, and become an internationally recognized contemporary artist: handing over her glass eye to Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist George Soros at the opening of the First Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007. Or at least, that is the moment that curator and art historian Tímea Junghaus has deemed pivotal in reframing Omara’s artistic practice, in which “actions, media presence, and performances” became an integral part.¹ During her lifetime, Omara relentlessly worked on carving out space for herself and other Roma artists in contemporary art institutions, which have historically refused to represent the voices of the Roma, even though the Roma are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe. Omara fought for artistic agency through painting, public appearances, and actions both inside and outside of art institutions—from exhibiting her work in a Hungarian prison² to creating the first Roma gallery in 1993 in her apartment.³ Her works were recently presented at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, by RomaMoMA—a transnational, collaborative project of OFF-Biennále Budapest and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

Born to a Roma family in Monor, Hungary, and raised in humble economic circumstances, Omara married a “peasant”—as she referred to non-Roma Hungarians⁴—and juggled raising their daughter with demanding jobs, including often working as a cleaning lady. She only began making art in 1988, at the age of forty-three, when she was suffering from a migraine: she drew a portrait of Sophia Loren, and by the time it was completed, her pain was gone.⁵ Realizing the healing potential of art-making, Omara began to paint episodes from her life, including her childhood memories and traumas. As a Romani woman and multiple cancer survivor, her firsthand experiences of dispossession, sexism, anti-Gypsyism, police violence, and neglect within the healthcare and education systems became the subjects of many of her paintings. In the beginning, she was humiliated for her artistic endeavors, even by family members, but her career quickly took a turn.

Omara always had an ambiguous relationship with art institutions: from early on, she had good instinct in terms of navigating their power structures but nonetheless played by her own rules, which were often seen as eccentric or even scandalous. In 1991, at the beginning of her career, she brought a painting depicting her eye surgery to the Hungarian National Gallery for evaluation. According to the artist, the director himself encouraged her to continue working.⁶ The following year, an incident at one of her early exhibitions in Szeged, Hungary, inspired a complete shift in her approach to painting and exhibiting work. A self-portrait depicting the artist on all fours, looking for her glass eye in the grass after a relative’s funeral—a real occurrence—was mistakenly titled “Mara Resting,” while a double portrait of Omara and her sister was mislabeled “Lesbians.” When the artist found out what the latter title meant, she was outraged and painted a picture of lesbians as a gift to the curator.⁷ After this episode, she began to inscribe her paintings with text to avoid misinterpretation.⁸

Her inscriptions, which she feverishly scribbled onto the surface of the paintings, often fill all the space around the protagonists in her flat, stylized compositions, sometimes even running over them. One sentence cuts into another, breaking the rules of grammar and linearity, forcing viewers to puzzle over the words and images as they attempt to follow the artist’s tempo and logic. Reconstructing language as a way to reflect her own unique voice, experience, and frustrations is in itself an act of defiance, but many of her exclamations are not only narrative, but also performative: if readers are willing to engage with the text, they might be blessed, cursed, or given instructions—for example, from “May—my—Gypsy—God—bless you!!!!!!!!!!” to “Think whatever you want!” Moreover, these exclamations were often extended into physical space and time. During exhibition openings, television interviews, and video performances,⁹ the artist frequently read them out loud, laughing, emphasizing, and adding further context and comments to her statements.

Woven into personal narratives, Omara’s paintings frequently comment on political events and criticize the systemic discrimination in Hungary against the Roma by the police, politicians, and others. One of her late paintings depicts the artist with two policemen, and the inscription reads: “Oh, but I pity you. You will never know what it is to be a good person—to sleep soundly. I still don’t understand why it—is—not—taught—to—the—police—that—a—70-year-old—Gypsy—woman—can’t—be—labeled—as—homeless?” In the text, Omara further describes how she was on her way to a hotel in Budapest, wearing a turban, to meet with the former Indonesian ambassador when the police stopped her to ask for her ID. In a short interview video, she adds, “If they knew I’m making money off of them, they wouldn’t fucking humiliate me.” In another example, “The peasant can drink in the pub from the social aid?. . .,” Omara calls out the mayor of Monok, whose legislation restricted how its residents could spend their government assistance: “Tell the mayor of Monok that my pension is 28,000 Ft [70 USD], he can tell his mother how to spend her pension but not the gypsy.” In an act of defiance, the artist painted herself and her daughter in the lush garden of her “luxury shack,” where both Omara and her animals are depicted smoking, as anyone receiving assistance was not allowed to buy cigarettes with it.

For more than two decades, Omara’s artistic practice was understood only in the context of her paintings, yet to fully comprehend the artist’s significance, it is crucial to analyze her interventions, media appearances, and public exposures—which might be referred to as performances, although I prefer to use the term “enactments.” Following Andrea Fraser, using this term allows us to “look past the specifically and narrowly defined artistic motives and meanings of what we do, framed by art discourse above all . . . and begin to take into account the full range of motives and meanings of our activities.”¹⁰ Omara never named, recorded, or framed these actions as works of art; indeed, many of them live on in the form of anecdotes and oral histories, or as video documentation by others. When viewed as integral to Omara’s body of work, they position the artist as a pioneer in bringing Roma resistance into the contemporary art institution.

Omara’s most cited and best-remembered enactment is her “I wasn’t invited scene,” in which she repeatedly interrupted art events and openings featuring her work. On these occasions, Omara made theatrical entrances to different institutions, and called out the organizers for failing to invite her to their event—whether or not this was actually the case—as Junghaus has recalled.¹¹ During one such intervention, analyzed in a roundtable by Tímea Junghaus and sociologist Éva Kovács, she interrupted a screening at the Kunsthalle in Budapest, appearing in a white dressing gown and white turban, causing a scene and accusing the organizers of leaving her out. Her interruptions could seem playful or hostile, depending on one’s awareness of her practice, but the timing, location, and outfit she wore were always strategically constructed. As Kovács has pointed out, Omara utilized these actions to carve out institutional spaces where she could stand.¹² Junghaus called them “ritualized productions, which are shaped and repeated under and due to oppression, building on the power of prohibition and taboos, and fleeing the horror of exclusion.”¹³ In her interventions, as well as in her media appearances, Omara enacted stereotypes projected onto her as a means of both provocation and self-protection.

A comparison between Omara’s interventions and the performances of conceptual artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady’s¹⁴ alter ego, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class),¹⁵ demonstrates how Romani women artists’ struggles within Central and Eastern European art institutions parallel those of Black women artists in the United States—albeit in a different period and under different sociopolitical circumstances¹⁶—and sheds light on how Omara’s work might find its place in the art historical canon. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire made her debut in 1980 at an opening at Just Above Midtown, a New York avant-garde art space championing Black artists. Wearing an evening gown and cape assembled from 180 pairs of white gloves, she performed a disruptive action in which she whipped herself with cat-o’-nine tails (transformed from the chrysanthemums she handed out) and shouted poems of protest, one of which ended in “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!” in criticism of Black artists she believed were catering to white audiences.¹⁷ She formulated this “guerilla-theater intervention”¹⁸ as a response to the exhibition Afro-American Abstraction, which had opened earlier that year at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1).¹⁹ As Zoé Whitley has pointed out, “With Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady could, from a unique perspective, address both systemic exclusions in the art museum and prevailing assumptions of what comprised the so-called Black experience in many culturally specific art spaces.”²⁰

Through utilizing different cultural markers and voicing their demands loud and clear, both Omara and O’Grady disrupted the normative behaviors of art institutions, pointing out their pervasive whiteness, which was present in the 2000s in Hungary just as much as it was in the mid-1970s and 1980s in the United States.²¹ But while O’Grady’s work is finally receiving the attention it deserves,²² Omara’s is not. In fact, her legacy has been more challenging to secure, even though the artist’s estate has become very active in showcasing her work both locally and internationally.²³ While Omara passed away two years ago, a major Hungarian or Eastern European institution has yet to step forward to hold a large-scale retrospective—the Ludwig Museum in Budapest could potentially initiate such an exhibition, as it owns eight paintings from Omara’s renowned blue series.²⁴

In response to the question of how the works and legacies of outstanding Roma artists like Omara could be shepherded, RomaMoMA has offered a potential solution. Modeled after a “nomadic, flexible institutional operation,” RomaMoMA critically approaches questions such as how a “Roma Museum of Contemporary Art” could operate to collect, present, and preserve the works of artists of Roma origin, or how we could “think about the cultural representation of a people, of an ethnic minority, without a nation-state behind it?”²⁵ While RomaMoMA aims to fill a gap in institutional representation of Roma artists, it also challenges the principles and practices of museums built on modernism and aims to contribute to a paradigm shift by “decolonizing the way in which the museum speaks (or does not speak) on behalf of communities whose cultural assets—whether an object, an artefact, or a story—have been stored in warehouses or put on display in exhibition halls for centuries.”²⁶ It is strategic about avoiding monographic presentations of artists²⁷ and follows a nomadic practice with pop-up exhibitions and events. Its latest exhibition, One Day We Shall Celebrate Again, presented at Documenta 15, featured Omara’s paintings and a twenty-six-minute-long video of the artist by János Sugár (Omara, 2010), among work by multiple generations of Roma artists.

While there is growing momentum and interest in exploring the work of Roma artists across Europe, with Documenta 15 being the latest example, it would not have been possible without RomaMoMA having paved the way to present their work in a transnational and collaborative way. Discussing the mission of RomaMoMA on the platform of MoMA begs the questions: In a future reality, will it be possible to close the gap between the two entities? Will brick-and-mortar institutions like MoMA²⁸—which is continuously reinventing its curatorial and acquisition strategies to become more inclusive—amplify the voices of Roma artists so that interventionist alternative projects will no longer be needed?

The second part of this article, “Disrupting the Institution through Language and Enactment: Omara’s Resistance, Part II,” which focuses exclusively on Omara’s enactments, has been published on the RomaMoMA blog by the author.

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Veronika Molnár: Let’s begin this conversation by acknowledging that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth, and the dire consequences of the climate crisis are being felt by many. In fact, you got to experience New York’s hurricane season firsthand during your recent residency at ISCP. In the face of such precariousness, how do you approach painting, and how can this medium contribute to addressing various climate and Anthropocene-related issues?

Rita Süveges: I left New York with a very strong image in my mind, as Hurricane Ida dealt a severe blow to the immediate vicinity of ISCP, my residency program in East Williamsburg. The gas station next to my studio was essentially underwater, with cars and trucks stuck in waist-deep water. This perfectly describes what the climate crisis looks like, and what makes this picture so strong is the fact that this weather event has paralyzed the fossil energy infrastructure—which is responsible for this disruption in the first place—in a city that will be flooded by the sea in thirty years. 

Painting has a tradition that is very important to me, and I love and enjoy using this medium. Some might say that other mediums have a bigger impact, but that aside, I think artistic practice differs from activism or science in the way it invites you to think about both existing and not-yet-existing phenomena. It evokes an aesthetic experience and generates emotions, and what is essential is that it works on a different register than the news or an academic paper, both of which communicate in the language of reason and logic—we know that humans are not rational beings.

VM: In Being Ecological, Timothy Morton argues that climate change began ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia with the development of agriculture.¹ Humans settled in cities, and their civilization and society began to separate from the nonhuman environment—which was, soon after, referred to as “nature.” In many ways, your work deals with issues of industrial agriculture, and I wonder where your interest in this complex topic originates.

RS: First of all, agriculture is one of the most violent landscape-shaping factors, and most of the time, we encounter nature through the visual representation of the landscape, which inevitably shapes our relationship to it. Then there’s also the subject of technology and how man manipulates the outside world. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, we have been driven by the promises of technological innovation and development to use resources as efficiently as possible. It is, of course, problematic to handle the material cycle of nature as a resource, but that is another issue. I’m interested in the ways in which agriculture falls victim to the ideas of technological development and “progress” in the order of capitalist production—that is, instead of fulfilling its primary responsibility of producing food, it becomes a means of accumulating capital and thus shifts into an unequal, extractivist relationship that depletes the ecosystem.

VM: One example that keeps appearing in the news is that Brazilian farmers burn the forests of the Amazon in order to gain pastureland for growing monocultures.

RS: Yes, and on top of that, these monocultures do not even produce human food, but rather cattle feed for the US beef export. I’m interested in the expansionary logic of technological development—which is the anthropogenic impact itself and directly related to the theme of fertilizers, the production of which relies heavily on fossil fuels. After World War II, the use of fertilizers skyrocketed partly due to the fact that nitrogen—the primary raw material in fertilizers—had previously been utilized as an explosive! With the end of the war, to replace the shrinking military market, nitrogen producers were looking for new buyers: what they used to sell to the military industry, they now sell to agricultural companies in the name of the Green Revolution, which, due to technology transfer initiatives between 1950 and the late 1960s, rapidly increased agricultural production.

VM: The painting of a robotic bee in your exhibition All Mere Weeds perhaps dovetails with this logic. I was hoping that the Black Mirror episode about these creatures would remain dystopian, but it seems that this is the direction in which we are heading.

RS: There are areas in China where real humans pollinate apple trees by hand with Q-tips, not only because the pollinators that were once part of the natural ecosystem are now extinct, but also because human labor is cheaper than hiring bee colonies. And at Harvard University, small robotic bees are being developed to do the job for even less. But is a new technology really the answer to the environmental collapse caused by human activity? Another important question is whether manual pollination is slave labor and whose work the robotic bees will take over. All the complex services, raw materials, and material cycles of an ecosystem cannot be translated into economic calculations, engineering blueprints, future simulations, and mechanized processes as the industry imagines. It’s about our lives, what we eat, how we work, whether our environment is livable—all these questions arise in connection with the robotic bee.

VM: To talk about another project of yours—even the title ‘out of control’ has an intriguing story: it is the term used by an Australian map application to describe a forest fire that has become unstoppable. It’s interesting to consider this designation in the context of the US, where such a term would not seem appropriate; the tracker of the New York Times, for example, indicates what percentage of a fire is “contained.” Can you tell us a little bit about this project?

RS: In ‘out of control’ I deal with the fossil energy infrastructure as the protagonist of the climate crisis. There are carbon atoms in almost everything on Earth; carbon transforms in a continuous cycle, and fossil fuels are also made of carbon atoms. So, I found it intriguing that in petrocapitalism, it is not only a political, economic, and environmental problem that can be discovered, but also a philosophical one—that is, the problem of deep time. The energy (life) that the ecosystem has accumulated over millions of years is burned by human societies in a century and a half, which is only a moment in geological time, and we are surprised that the natural cycle of matter is overthrown.

I made diptychs in which I placed the material and symbolic meanings of petroculture in dialogue. Take, for example, oceanic plankton and calcareous skeletons, which under the influence of heat and pressure over millions of years, turn into crude oil. Those who refuel their car with diesel rarely think about this. At the same time, there is a special custom in Azerbaijan—patients are immersed in a crude oil bath due to its alleged healing effect. This mystical logic caught my imagination: the country’s main raw material brings not only wealth but also health to its citizens. Or consider that the culture of masculinity is associated with petroleum, through car culture, speed, and demonstration of power, and how this can be paralleled with the extractivist exploitation of nature’s reproductive processes, such as mining.

VM: Maybe here we can segue into the multidisciplinary artist group xtro realm’s activities. I’m curious to hear about the work you do with your co-founders Anna Zilahi and Gideon Horváth, and the ways in which your role at xtro complements your own practice. 

RS: In the last four years, we have organized exhibitions, reading circles, field trips, lectures, and a series of studies, as well as published a book. What we are most proud of is that we have brought the topic of climate and ecological crisis into the field of contemporary art in Hungary, and done so with a critical approach—so that we have always discussed social aspects and, let’s say, geology at the same time. Anna and I edited the Climate Imaginary Reader and invited young scholars to propose local responses to the global challenges of the climate crisis—each in their own fields, like ecofeminism, biopolitics, energy policy, food production, and so on. The texts ascribe to the principles of interdisciplinarity and interconnectedness as practices that underpin radical imagination. Through xtro’s events, one of our main goals was to connect disciplines, because the climate crisis must obviously be discussed in the context of the capitalist system of production that runs the world and, inevitably, the social inequalities that result from it.

To answer your second question, my white cube exhibitions have been complemented by field trips, which I have organized within xtro realm. On the Anthropocene excursions, we went straight “into” the landscape to talk about nature, what capitalism has to do with the environment, how the interconnected perspective of ecology can be extended beyond nature—or, to put it simply, what the difference is between trees planted in a square grid and a forest ecosystem. On another trip, we visited a Hungarian oil refinery with critical energy researcher John Szabó. We were dressed in safety uniforms and toured around the steamy and smelly cyberpunk scenery of cracking plants and fractionators, and then discussed the geopolitics of energy systems. It is an essential part of my creative practice to generate dialogue through provoking experiences.

VM: In 2019 xtro realm published an “Encyclopedia towards a post-anthropocentric world” entitled extrodaesia, in which you introduced concepts such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology (OOO). One of the most defining theses of OOO is that things cannot be comprehended merely by their attributes or relations; nevertheless, you used an encyclopedia format, which has the general purpose of systematizing and summarizing knowledge. How did you approach this contradiction between form and content?

RS: We have found that the Hungarian public is not familiar with new concepts related to ecology, such as OOO or the thoughts of Bruno Latour and the Anthropocene, so we thought it would be a good idea to introduce these notions in one volume. But we have twisted the concept of an encyclopedia: the main endeavor was to juxtapose poetic texts and the visual map interweaving the book with theoretical entries. We wanted to blur the boundaries separating imagination and theory to question the concept of knowledge-production originating from the Enlightenment; thus, in extrodaesia, emotions and intuitions are put into dialogue with so-called rational and objective knowledge.  

VM: Tell us a little bit about xtro realm’s most ambitious project to date: ACLIM! Agency for Climate Imaginary!, which was exhibited in 2021 at OFF-Biennale Budapest.² You have expanded the network and activities of the group through collaboration with professionals working in different disciplines within the agency. Did this association come together for only the OFF-Biennale, or could it become a long-term project?

RS: The exhibition was the culmination of a two-year process in which we organized several public events under the name Climate Crisis and Imagination, with the aim to create a transdisciplinary discourse around the topic of the ecological and climate crisis. Our method was to explore the cultural, material, and historical embeddedness that restricts our imagination on individual and social levels. To quote Fredric Jameson, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”³ So we examined the factors that make us unable to imagine another structure of life.

The ACLIM! Agency for Climate Imaginary! exhibition comprised seven new research-based commissions by artists, and was accompanied by events, and the Reader. We also conducted interviews and, due to the precarious COVID-19 situation, have archived the project on our web platform.

The xtro realm group has been working together enthusiastically for four years, on a volunteer basis and severely underfunded, and now we are thinking about ways to make such a project sustainable so that self-exploitation does not lead to a dead end, as is often the case in the art world.

VM: Though your works are not explicitly critical of the government, I wonder if you’ve experienced any form of censorship—or any bizarre reactions from Hungarian art institutions. In my experience, as long as you’re under the radar, you can do anything in small, financially independent art spaces (although they are few and far between), but venues such as the Ludwig Museum or the Hungarian National Gallery are so influential and visible that self-censorship is unwittingly a factor. 

RS: The somewhat worn-out system of art institutions is open to us and accepting of our activities—as for its administrators, political means mentioning Viktor Orbán, which we rarely do publicly. However, we have had a few rejections from scientific institutions, namely for our exhibition ACLIM!, which we curated for the OFF-Biennale. We wanted to carry out the group show in collaboration with researchers at a scientific institution, in addition to using their space for the exhibition, but the management did not want to risk presenting anything that might seem oppositional. We also attempted to collaborate with a research institute but got rejected after the director who was supposed to host our project was dismissed due to repeatedly voicing his criticism of the government to the media.

VM: I want to mention your residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program as well. It was a relatively short program, but I would be curious to hear if you’ve encountered a phenomenon, either local or global, that has caught your attention, or that you’d like to focus on in the future.

RS: I spent two months at ISCP through the support of the Visegrad Fund. I only got a glimpse of New York as a cultural center and center of consumerism, which I involuntarily and immediately became part of. Of course, I already felt guilty because of flying back and forth across the ocean, which emits as much CO₂ as if I was driving from the suburbs to downtown Budapest every day for a whole year.

Of all the peak capitalist messes, the oil story gets me the most: Greenpoint has been part of American oil history since Newtown Creek was a heavy industrial district with huge oil refineries. Although these refineries stopped operating in the 1960s, they left an estimated 15 to 30 million gallons of oil pollution underground. This so-called tar blob is the second largest oil spill in the US, and it is right in New York City! Crude oil is constantly leaking into the Creek and evaporating into the air, so allegedly there’s a disproportionate number of cancer cases in the area. ExxonMobile is heir to the refineries that created the crisis, and thanks to strong activism and artistic work, it is finally beginning to clean up the site, which will take decades. This blob is also an uncanny picture—to end the interview with another symbolic image—that, polluting the spirit of New York, is a black stain on the city’s collective subconscious.

Translated by Sári Nemes

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