Side Gallery
Current Exhibition
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm.
THE ROMA JOURNEYS
Joakim Eskildsen
Saturday 19 April to Saturday 14 June
This people has an estimated 20 million members... There are reasons for this imprecision... Experience has taught them of the injuries they and their families can be subjected to once they have been identified – which means registered. Only some rudiments of their language, Romani, have been recorded in written form. And there are reasons for this reticence too: a purely oral mother-tongue tradition has greater chances of survival in a consistently hostile environment. What cannot be recorded in writing evades its persecutors more easily. Günter Grass
Between 2000 and 2006 Joakim Eskildsen travelled in seven different countries photographing the life of the Roma and the conditions they face. The journeys, in India, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Greece, Finland and France, came about as a result of chance, coincidence and personal contact, rather than any process of meticulous planning. What the journeys open up on is somewhere and something beyond nations. As Grass writes in the foreword to Eskildsen’s and writer Cia Rinne’s book The Roma Journeys:
They are, from their centuries of experience, in a position to teach us how to cross borders, indeed, to abolish the borders in and around us and to create the kind of Europe without borders that is not only the subject of empty oratory but an actual state of affairs.