Ceija Stojka (1933-2013): „I can’t forget” | exhibition

The first solo exhibition of the Roma painter and writer at the Museum of the City of Łódź 05.10.2024 – 01.12.2024

“If the world doesn’t change now – if the world doesn’t open its doors and windows – if it doesn’t build a room of real peace – so that my great-grandchildren will have the chance to live in this world, I won’t be able to explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück” (Ceija Stojka)

Although Stojka’s painting arose directly from her dramatic experience of the Holocaust, she did not begin to paint until several decades after the end of the Second World War. She was not a professionally trained painter. However, regardless of this, her painting is an extremely strong and coherent artistic statement. Her work is one of the most poignant testimonies to the Holocaust, and at the same time a testimony that is very mature in its form.

Stojka built the composition of her paintings around poignant, usually highly dynamic frames. She had an extraordinary capacity for detail, which was particularly evident in her nostalgic depictions of her pre-war childhood. But also to create symbolic and synthetic compositions, which was particularly evident when she depicted direct images of death. Many of her works take the form of retrospective documents, although many of them are attempts to depict situations that Stojka did not witness. There are recurring motifs in her paintings that lead us to read her paintings as symbolic. All the works show what a sensitive colourist she was – after all, colour had its own very important meaning in her work. Some of her works are downright abstract compositions.

Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) – Roma artist and writer. She was born and spent her early years in Styria, Austria. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, her family were sent to concentration camps. Stojka was only ten years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. She survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Of her entire family of around two hundred people, only six survived the war: she, her mother and four siblings.

It was only in the 1980s, more than forty years later, that she finally broke her silence and became one of the first Roma women to speak out about her memories and experiences of the Holocaust. She described her childhood in several books and in more than 1,500 paintings and drawings. Stojka was a self-taught artist who gradually developed her own style, incorporating bright colours and strong expressiveness. She painted not only with a brush but also with her hands, and all her work was done at home, in the kitchen or in the living room.

The Łódź exhibition, the artist’s first presentation in Poland, traces Stojka’s life, a period of happy childhood, deportation, time in concentration camps and liberation. The exhibition will be accompanied by curatorial tours, lectures and workshops.

Team

• Co-organizer of the exhibition: Museum of the City of Łodź
• Curator of the exhibition: Noëlig Le Roux
• Text to folder: Marie Cantos and Noëlig Le Roux
• Project initiator: Jarosław Suchan
• Substantive cooperation: Joanna Podolska-Płocka
• Graphic design of exhibition and folder: Fajne Chłopaki
• Drawing of exhibition design: Dziewczyny od Wystaw (Joanna Góra-Raurowicz, Katarzyna Similak).
• Production: Aleksandra Shaya
• Proofreading and editing of folder and exhibition text: Marta Grochowska and James Waygood
• Coordination of loans: Natalia Scegielniak-Glica
• Coordination of availability: Paulina Długosz
• Coordination of the exhibition: Ewelina Skorupa
• Cooperation: Anna Karbowiak, Bartosz Krzemień, Magdalena Makówka, Wojciech Owczarek, Paweł Zaremba
• Exhibition montage: Sebastian Glica and team: Jarosław Barański, Wiktor Dzwoniarek, Piotr Nowicki, Marcin Sadłowski, Paweł Sobolewski

Exhibition partners: Foundation Towards Dialogue, Warsaw Ghetto Museum, Austrian Forum of Cultures, The International Fund Ceija Stojka, he Lanicolacheur Company/Xavier Marchand, The Antoine de Galbert Foundation, Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź

Accompanying programme

• 6.10.2024, 12.00 Good Conversation Centre: „Art as testimony: Ceija Stojka, the Roma history and the memory of the survivors” – lecture and walk to the Kuźnia Romska – Dr Joanna Talewicz (Foundation Towards Dialogue) and the Museum of Independence Traditions / event translated into Polish Sign Language / The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, st. Wojska Polskiego 83 / Free entry
• 6.10.2024, 15.00 „Ceija Stojka (1933-2013): I can’t forget” – curatorial tour of the exhibition / leading: Noëlig Le Roux / event in French translated into Polish and Polish Sign Language / TICKETS: 5 PLN – reduced tickets / 7 PLN – regular price
• 11.10.2024, 10.00 „Antiziganism in Europe – a new word, old mechanisms, a contemporary struggle for memory” – anti-discrimination workshop for high schools at the exhibition “Ceija Stojka (1933-2013): I can’t forget” / conducted by Małgorzata Kołaczek (Foundation Towards Dialogue) / Museum of the City of Łódź, st. Ogrodowa 15 TICKETS: 5 PLN / Zapisy: edukacja@centrumdialogu.com
• 9.11.2024, 17.00 „A non-existent history. On women considered asocial in KL Auschwitz” – lecture by Joanna Ostrowska / Museum of the City of Łódź, st. Ogrodowa 15 / TICKETS: 5 PLN and 7 PLN
  In the second half of the twentieth century, Roma art acted as a tool for making the Roma Holocaust visible during the period of their ethnic and political mobilisation, i.e. from the 1970s onwards, but its effectiveness in making this historical fact visible declined at the beginning of the twenty-first century, after Roma art was integrated into the field of art institutionalised by the majority nations. The speaker will take a closer look at the themes taken up by Roma artists creating works about the Roma Holocaust, which arise from its specificity: making memorial place visible, making images of victims visible, making visible the racist motifs of the Nazi crime against the Roma.
  Joanna Ostrowska – PhD in history, also studied at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University, the Department of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Gender Studies at the University of Warsaw, the Department of Hebrew Studies at the University of Warsaw and the PWSFTviT in Łódź. Academic lecturer, film critic, playwright, author of acclaimed books: “Unmentioned. Sexual Forced Labor during World War II” and “They: Homosexuals during World War II”.
• 30.11.2024, 17.00 “Even death is afraid of Auschwitz” – lecture by Monika Weychert / Museum of the City of Łódź, st. Ogrodowa 15 / TICKETS: 5 PLN and 7 PLN
  A lecture by Monika Weychert on art by Roma people commemorating their experiences of the Holocaust.
  Monika Weychert – PhD in Cultural Studies, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Journalism and Social Communication at the SWPS University in Warsaw. At the same time, she is the Head of the Education Department at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art. Since 2016, she has also collaborated with the Instytut Badań Przestrzeni Publicznej at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Author of academic and critical articles; member of AICA. In Toruń, she ran the independent Gallery for… (2000-2008), was associated with TVP Kultura, the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw and the Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum in Królikarnia (a branch of the MNW). Curator of dozens of exhibitions. She has been working on contemporary art by people with Roma roots for 25 years.