We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, edited by Daniel Baker (artist, curator, and researcher, London) and Maria Hlavajova (artistic director of BAK, Utrecht), inquires into the contemporary moment through the lens of Roma artistic and intellectual practices, gathering knowledge from the Roma way of life. As the so-called West’s misconceptions of itself, inherited from the legacy of the modern, are being unmasked through unprecedented shifts in politics, society, aesthetics, and economics—what can we learn from the commonalities among political struggles of historically marginalized communities such as Roma and in what we know as majority society? With the emblematic claim in the artistic imaginary “we Roma,” including in it wider society—how can we invoke the possibility of a different world and alternative futures? Artists, theorists, writers, and activists—both Roma and non-Roma—speculate on such questions and the possibility of art to imagine the world otherwise.

With contributions by: Albert Atkin (philosopher; Sydney); Huub van Baar (researcher and writer, Amsterdam); Damian James Le Bas (writer, journalist, poet, and filmmaker, Essex) & Delaine Le Bas (artist, various locations across Europe); Zygmunt Bauman (social theorist; Leeds); Ethel Brooks (writer and researcher, New Jersey); Agnes Daróczi (curator and activist, Budapest); Tony Gatlif (film director, actor, composer, and producer; Algiers) & Cécile Kovacshazy (researcher and writer; Limoges) with Alex Lykidis (film theorist, New York); Ian Hancock (Roma linguist, historian, and political advocate, Austin); Sanja Iveković (artist, Zagreb); Timea Junghaus (curator and cultural activist, Budapest); Regina Römhild (cultural anthropologist and curator, Berlin) & Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (curator and writer, Berlin); Salman Rushdie (novelist and essayist, London and New York); and Mike Sell (theorist, Pittsburgh).