Beyond Identity: Rethinking the Cultural Geography of Europe Through Curatorial Practice
For decades, Roma artistic practices have often been discussed as if they occupied a separate cultural category—important, certainly, but somehow adjacent to the broader narratives of European contemporary art.
This way of thinking has helped make many artists and artistic practices more visible. But it has also imposed limits.
It has encouraged us to ask whether an artist is "Roma" before asking what their work contributes to contemporary artistic discourse.
Recent research and curatorial work across Central and Eastern Europe suggest a different perspective.
Travelling through artists' studios, independent art spaces, museums and cultural organisations across Poland, Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary reveals something that cannot easily be understood through identity alone. The conversations unfolding across the region are remarkably interconnected. Artists respond to shared histories of authoritarianism, migration, industrial transformation, ecological crisis, feminism, memory politics and social care. Artists working from Roma experiences are not standing outside these conversations. They are among those shaping them.
This shift matters.
Rather than treating Roma artistic practices as a specialised field requiring occasional inclusion, we might begin to understand them as an integral part of the cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe.
The question is no longer simply how museums, biennials and cultural institutions represent artists working from Roma experiences.
The deeper question is whether our understanding of the region itself remains incomplete without their contributions.
Across Central and Eastern Europe, collaboration has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary artistic practice. Independent initiatives, transnational partnerships and community-based forms of knowledge production increasingly challenge inherited national narratives.
Within this landscape, Roma artistic practices do not constitute an exception. They illuminate some of the region's most urgent questions.
Questions about memory.
About displacement.
About care.
About democratic participation.
About the unfinished histories that continue to shape the present.
This also requires a different curatorial methodology.
Curating artistic practices emerging from Roma experiences should not consist simply of increasing representation. It should create new frameworks in which artistic practices can be understood through the networks, relationships and shared histories that connect them across borders.
Perhaps the future lies not in maintaining Roma artistic practices as a separate conversation, but in recognising how they reshape our understanding of the cultural geography of Europe itself.
In that sense, the question is no longer whether artists working from Roma experiences belong within European contemporary art.
They already do.
The real question is whether our institutions, museums and art histories are prepared to recognise what has long been true.
