Andaro angluno vast | First-Hand

Nihad Nino Pusija

Photography is the most historically complex and problematic genre to ever appropriate the Roma subject. Will Roma ever be able to dissociate themselves from the traumatizing – sexualizing, feminizing, and criminalizing – practices of photographic representation used throughout the history of anthropology and ethnography? And has it become definitively impossible to turn and re-turn the photographic gaze?

Since his first exhibition in Sarajevo (1988), the questions sketched out above have been central to the work of the artist and photographer Pusija. He continues to offer new ways to create and perceive authentic images while dealing with anti-Roma prejudices and their political consequences, such as deportation and assimilation. In doing so, he contributes to the contemporary European art scene’s on-going critical analysis of the role that pictures of so-called ‘others’ play in the self-image of those portrayed.

His series of portraits of internationally known Romani artists and activists, will be shown for the first time in 2020 at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).