This is Another Socially Engaged Conversation … on anti-racist practices
Open Call for Participation in an International Art Workshop for young artists and cultural professionals
Date: 7 March 2026 (Saturday), 11:30–18:00
Venue: Turbina Cultural Centre, Vajdahunyad u. 4., 1082 Budapest
The program is organized in collaboration between OFF-Biennale Budapest, Bura Gallery (Budapest), and the CEU Romani Studies Program, with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Hungary.
The context of the program
The workshop forms part of OFF-Biennale Budapest’s long-term program, which collaborates in various formats with artists and thinkers of Roma origin to explore contemporary forms, possibilities, and limitations of Roma cultural representation, as well as related social issues such as institutional racism. The international gathering to be held in Budapest on 6–7 March 2026 marks an important milestone within the international collaborations connected to OFF-Biennale’s most recent edition, Poems of Unrest (2025), and continues the RomaMoMA project presented at documenta fifteen (2022).
The aim of the meeting is to connect Roma experiences with those of other marginalized, minority, and diasporic communities living in Europe, and to examine how art can contribute to achieving transformative justice in response to structural racism. A key objective of the program is to share good practices and to bring together different forms of knowledge—artistic, academic, and civic/activist.
Historically, the situation of Roma minorities in Europe has most often been discussed in relation to the respective national majorities, and less frequently in comparison with the experiences of other “non-white” European minorities. This program seeks to broaden that perspective: we aim to situate the knowledge of Roma artists and their allies within a wider European discourse on decolonization and justice.
The title of the program was inspired by a painting by Gipsy Criminals.
The outline of the two-day program
Friday, 6 March
17:00 Angéla Kóczé (CEU Romani Studies): Who Cleans the Country? Postcolonial Ambivalence and the Politics of Anti-Roma Racism in Hungary
17:30 Lecture by Quinsy Gario, artist and educator from Curaçao and St. Maarten, based in the Netherlands
18:20 Clara Farkas: Presentation of Bura Gallery (Budapest)
18:40 Hilda Moucharrafieh: Presentation of (A)WAKE (Rotterdam)
19:20 Roundtable discussion with the speakers, moderated by Judit Ignácz
The Friday event is public and will be held in English.
Saturday, 7 March
Closed, workshop-based session – This open call relates specifically to this section of the program, schedule:
11:40–12:00: Registration / Doors open
12:00–13:10: Introduction by Gipsy Criminals, Cat Jugravu, and Hilda Moucharrafieh
13:10–14:10: Lunch
14:10–16:00: Workshops
16:00–16:30: Coffee break
16:30–18:00: Presentation of workshop outcomes and group discussion
Participants will work in small groups with one of the above-mentioned artists, engaging with the intersections of racism, exclusion, minority and diasporic experiences, decolonization, and the relationship between contemporary art and activism.
Workshop descriptions
GIPSY CRIMINALS:
In the Dadaist workshop by Gipsy Criminals, participants will create political satire by subverting the claims and language of hate-inciting and populist political propaganda through the tools of irony and humor.
In the first part of the workshop, the founding members of the artist collective will introduce participants to the Gipsy Criminals Manifesto and present their previous works. This will be followed by a creative exercise in which participants produce their own hand-drawn posters responding to the absurdities of our contemporary political reality.
The Gipsy Criminals artist collective was founded in 2024 and defines itself as a Dadaist project. Its aim is to confront anti-Roma racism and xenophobia through critical satire, while also highlighting the sometimes hypocritical attitudes adopted by the art world in relation to these issues. Employing the method of hyper-identification with stereotypes, the collective’s members—MC Lakatos Hunor, Count Nagybányai Horthy Rolex Leonidász, and Hádész Junior, the miniature pinscher—construct a sharp critical narrative infused with humor and irony. As they put it: “We use the term ‘Gypsy criminality’ provocatively because we want to reclaim it from the far-right narrative. No one can prevent the use of this expression, so if that is the case, we assign additional meaning to it and reconstruct the term ‘Gypsy criminality.’” In 2025, Cigánybűnözők presented a new commission as part of OFF-Biennale.
CAT JUGRAVU: REPRESENTATION, RECONSIDERED
The session examines representation as a question of obligation, authorship, and the conditions under which art is produced. Informed by a familiar pressure on marginalised artists: the expectation to explain themselves, to translate lived experience into narrative, and to make their identities legible through cultural production We seek to ask a more fundamental question: is depiction always necessary, ethical, or desired? What if we shifted attention from the artwork to the decisions that precede it—who is expected to speak, who benefits from this speech, and how systems of extraction persist even within gestures of solidarity and self-representation? The session outcome is a method. Participants are expected to develop a heightened awareness of when representation begins to reproduce harm, when authorship becomes ownership, and when withholding becomes a legitimate and powerful artistic position. The 90 minutes workshop provides a transferable framework for approaching cultural work without defaulting to self-exposure or narrative extraction. Representation, Reconsidered, is inviting artists and cultural practitioners, particularly those who identify as Romani, BIPOC and those working in proximity to marginalised communities.It constitutes the first chapter of a broader discursive project: The Lab of Refusal, Responsibility, and Artistic Positioning.
Cat Jugravu (Romanian Romani) is a Berlin-based theatre director, performer, poet, and social worker. Her interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of performance, critical pedagogy, and curation, developing collective methodologies that interrogate memory, representation, and cultural authority. She is the founder and artistic director of the QUEERDOS Kollektiv and a core member of the DePART Collective. Through these structures, she facilitates spaces where authorship and visibility are examined as functions of power. Her projects—encompassing performance, installation, and long-term workshops—often function as performative archives, creating shared platforms for knowledge production that challenge extractive cultural norms. Jugravu’s work has been presented in institutional and grassroots contexts across Europe. She approaches performance as a mode of critical inquiry and collective negotiation, centring refusal as a methodology, care as an infrastructural principle, and relational responsibility as the core of ethical practice.
HILDA MOUCHARRAFIEH:
How do we respond to racial discrimination while not falling into the defensive victim trap? In this session, we will craft together approaches and strategies of witty responses that safeguard our dignity and expose the weakness of bigotry. We will base this on actual statements by politicians and TV media figures, or perhaps a discriminatory law or an oppressive state regulation from your own contexts. During the workshop session, Hilda Moucharrafieh will share inspiring examples of cultural resilience from her artistic practice as well as from her lived contexts of Lebanon and The Netherlands. However, the material (whether text, visual, or situation) will be brought in by the participants, reflecting their socio-economic situations, and political realities.
Hilda Moucharrafieh is an artist, tutor and cultural practitioner based in Amsterdam. Through her artistic research practice, she makes artistic interventions in public space with mediums that are site-specific and stemming from research. Her work tells stories of people that are excluded from the dominant narratives, which are not reflected in the designed spaces of the city, its public squares and historical monuments..Hilda Moucharrafieh holds a BA in Graphic Design from Lebanon, and an MFA in Scenography from the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU), The Netherlands, where she has been a tutor at the Master Scenography programme since 2017. In 2016-2017 she was a fellow at the Home Workspace 10-month program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon. Since 2021, Hilda Moucharrafieh is part of the artistic team at (A)WAKE in Rotterdam, as well as an advisor for scenography, performance and theatre design in the Design Jury Committee at the Creative Industries Fund in Rotterdam. She collaborates across disciplines to foster solidarity, and also co-directs Platform BK advocating for better art policy in the Netherlands.
Who can apply?
Young Roma and non-Roma artists, curators, cultural workers, students, and early-career professionals based in Hungary.
Applicants should have an interest in:
- the contemporary artistic engagement with Roma and other minority experiences,
- anti-racist and decolonial approaches,
- the intersections between artistic practice and social justice.
Participation requires proficiency in English, as the workshop will take place with international participants and the working language will be English. The Gipsy Criminals workshop will be held in Hungarian.
How to apply
Applications can be submitted by completing the following Google form: https://forms.gle/m49UcEiTMGxCPqGD7
Workshop preferences will be taken into account as far as possible when forming the groups.
Deadline
Application deadline: 2 March 2026 (Monday), midnight.
Selected participants will be notified by email after the application deadline.
(Cover image: Gipsy Criminals, We Protect You …, 2025, photo: Flóra Dobos © OFF-Biennale Budapest archive)
