The CEU Romani Studies, CEU Jewish Studies Program and the Blinken OSA Archivum cordially invite you to join us for a special roundtable discussion & short film screening
Forgotten Dead: The Memory of the Roma Holocaust
November 8, 2023
6:00 p.m. (CET)
In-Person @ Blinken OSA Archivum | Arany János u. 32, 1051Budapest
On-Line @ Zoom (please register to receive the link)
With discussants Angéla Kóczé, Anna Lujza Szász, Daniel Véri
About the Event
This roundtable discussion explores the circumstances under which the Roma Holocaust was partially forgotten in Central Europe during Socialism and the various ways its representation nevertheless emerged, especially in the cultural sphere.
The event begins with the screening of József Lakatos’s 1981 Forgotten Dead, a short film (17 minutes) dealing with the Roma Holocaust. The pioneering work represents a mixture of the documentary genre, with interviews, including survivors’ testimonies and that of a fiction film.
Blinken OSA Archivum’s current exhibition offers a starting point for the discussion. Titled “Commissioned Memory. Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965,” it introduces a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz, as well as an exceptional work from 1960 (‘Vampire Hitler,’ based on Simon Wiesenthal’s 1946 drawing), created for the same venue.
The exhibition material is amended with György Jovánovics’s 1974 Plan for a Roma Holocaust Memorial, the earliest Hungarian artwork dealing with the issue that was missing from both 1960s exhibitions. A video interview with the artist will be published on the Archivum’s blog (https://osaarchivum.444.hu/), the complete Hungarian transcript in Artmagazin, whereas the English version is available online: https://www.artmagazin.hu/articles/in_english/an_unattainable_floating_whiteness_now_that_would_have_been_something
About the Speakers
is an Assistant Professor of Romani Studies, Chair of Romani Studies Program, and Academic Director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at Central European University, Budapest. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem (NC). She was the principal investigator of a research project (2013-16) on Institutionalization of Romani Politics After 1989 in Hungary, funded by the Hungarian Social Research Fund.
Her research focuses on the intersections between gender, ethnicity and class as well as the social and legal inequalities faced by the Roma in various European counties. She has published several peer-reviewed academic articles and book chapters with various international presses including Palgrave Macmillan, Ashgate, and Central European University Press, as well as several thematic policy papers related to social inclusion, gender equality, social justice and civil society. She is a co-editor of The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2019, and The Roma and their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2020).
Anna Lujza Szász is a sociologist, she received her doctoral degree in Sociology with her thesis, titled Memory Emancipated. Exploring the memory of the Nazi genocide of Roma in Hungary. She is a researcher at the Art Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Her research involves contemporary visual art; ethical, pedagogical, political implications of various practices of ethnicity and historical remembrance; dynamics between domination and resistance; and the ethnic dimension in structural formations.
Daniel Véri is an art and cultural historian, researcher at the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) in Budapest. CEU Jewish Studies postdoctoral fellow at the Democracy Institute (2021–22), member of the ‘Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History’ research group (UCL, 2019–22). He studied at ELTE (history of art: MA, 2009; PhD, 2016), and at CEU (history, 2010).
His research interests include Central European art from the 1945–89 period, especially the artistic reception of Jewish identity and the Holocaust, as well as cultural diplomacy and the cultural history of blood libels. Author of ”Leading the Dead” – The World of János Major (2013), co-author of The Great Book Theft. French Book Exhibition Behind the Iron Curtain (2020). Curator and co-curator of numerous research-based exhibitions.
This event has been organized with the great support of
The Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI)
Please register both for Zoom and attending in person at the following link
https://forms.office.com/e/YJyV4MLCUX?origin=lprLink
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