For Ceija Stojka, Memory Is Survival
The Drawing Center exhibition “Ceija Stojka: Making Visible” presents over 50 paintings and drawings by Austrian Romani artist and Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka (1933–2013), emphasizing memory as both testimony and cultural survival. Stojka, who was largely self-taught and worked across poetry, writing, performance, music, and visual art, became in the late 1980s the first Romani-Austrian woman to publicly recount her Holocaust experiences. The show also foregrounds her depictions of everyday Romani life, including an untitled 1995 acrylic-on-paper landscape of an Austrian lake with her family’s traveling wagon, linking the wagon motif to Romani sovereignty and the wheel on the Romani flag. The article notes that Stojka was born into a Lovara family and situates her work within the long history of persecution of Romani people in Europe.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Auction Fever, Art’s Lost-and-Found Reckoning