Graphic Design: Pálhegyi Flóra

ZSK2028 Marom20 festival shows Zsuzsi Flohr How I realized...? exhibition that includes three programs: an opening event, a professional workshop, and a closing event

The exhibition is open between 2021.25.08 and 14.09. at Massolit Book Store. 

About the exhibition:

The current arts-based project I am working on, titled “How I realized I was Roma, How I realized I was a Jew,” deals with the commonalities and differences in concealing, rejecting, or embracing Jewish and Roma identity by members of the Third Generation after the Shoah/Porajmos. This project explores the various coping strategies that post-Shoah/ Porajmos generations have employed to grapple with their own family origins and presents. Between 1980 and 1988 András Kovács, Fer-enc Erős and Katalin Lévai conducted life in- interviews with second-generation Hungarian Jews and published in 1985 “How I Found Out that I am a Jew” in Medvetánc.

Starting from the Erős-Kovács-Lévai inter- views, the project examines possible methodological interoperability, borrowing the title of the original research and supplementing it with “ How I realized I was Roma, How I realized I was a Jew?” through this project. All this is based on my personal experience, which I experienced as a person born in Hungary in the 1980s; as I discovered my own origins. I juxta- pose my own experiences of recognition and discovery, and examine the ways in which other families of other backgrounds have sometimes hidden, rejected, or lived, mastered their “hidden” or “tabooed” origins.

The question arises again: How did you realize you were Jewish? How did you realize you were Roma? We would think that today’s young generation grew into their own cultural identity in some natural way, meaning religious or ethnic consciousness, cultural traditions, family customs, or some mixture of these. We would think, as the original research suggests: whoever is a Roma or a Jew in most parts of the world today does not realize this, rather naturally inherited by his/her family, his/her everyday and cultural environment, and he/ she is acknowledged by the society in which he/she lives.

The audio and video materials were edited by Andrea Ausztrics.

Partners and sponsors: Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich / Bundesministerium – Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport, Wien / Visegrad Scholarship at OSA and the Central European University / Tarbut / Joods Dutch Jewish Humanitarian Fund / JDC, Mozaik Zsidó Közösségi Hub / Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden / Magyarországi Cionista Szövetség / ZSK – Zsidó Kultúra 2028