Paper short abstract:

In April 2021, the 41 m2 tableau of Tamás Péli will be exhibited in the Budapest History Museum, in the framework of the Off-Biennale, being the largest independent arts initiative in Hungary. This exhibition will be ground-breaking for multiple reasons: Roma art is rarely represented in such prestigious public institutions in Hungary and this painting has been invisible now for several years.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the processes of exhibiting one of the most significant Roma artworks in Hungary: the Birth tableau of Tamás Péli. Péli, who, in contrast with most autodidact Roma artists, graduated from the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam, created in 1983 a large painting for the orphanage in Tiszadob. This foster home was the largest in state-socialist Hungary and for the Roma children living there, Péli’s mythical painting signified a tool for cultural identification; as Péli explained: “I was able to create this myth of birth among people who did not even consider their own birth a part of their identity”. When the orphanage in Tiszadob closed, the painting was moved to the storehouse of a regional museum in Northern Hungary and therefore, remained invisible since then. With the exhibition of the tableau next year, there will be new possibilities for a greater visibility, revalorisation and re-interpretation. The paper examines the cultural-historic context of the painting, its ambiguous role in a dictatorial regime and the questions that its re-exhibition poses in the more general context of minority heritage-making. The introduction of the painting in the hybrid collaboration of a public museum and an independent, bottom-up initiative, creating a discursive space, will contribute to the analysis of tensions between minority heritage and mainstream cultural canon and to the questioning of cultural democracy in different political regimes, in which, despite of various cultural policies, Roma cultural heritage still lacks recognition.