Emília Rigová – oltaRIG

2. 10. 2024

Emília Rigová, altaRIG, 2020

Her work is a museum or cabinet of curiosities of herself. References include Warburg‘s Bilderatlas, mood walls in teenage bedrooms, Pinterest boards or the detective boards studied by art historian W. J. T. Mitchell.

It is a visualsemantic concretion: gifts from friends, fetishes, souvenirs, talismans, favourite “Roma” memorabilia, miniatures, and fragments from her own works, for example a video
anthology. All this is arranged to be viewed from a distance as well as under a camera lens in a kind of mental grid of a single large shelf. It is a self-portrait, intimate and, at the same time, tightly edited. This (self-)staging and altar of her own identity is an invitation to a reading adventure and interpretive cannibalism.

Based on the text by Petra Hanáková for the solo exhibition E.R. Kale bala, parno muj ( 2020) in Schemnitz gallery.

“What racism and colonialism have in common is that both these words are -isms based on the power that produced the word slave, both in the mental and physical worlds."

Image captions

1 | Emília Rigová, altaRIG, 2020, Courtesy of the artist
2 | Emília Rigová, Blind Man’s Bluff, 2012, collection – colour photograph on paper 40 × 60 cm (4 pieces),
3 | Emília Rigová, 2 textile objects – a red scarf and a black balaclava, fabric embroidery, Courtesy of the artist

Emília Rigová

(*1980, Trnava) is a visual artist and researcher at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. Her works reflect her personal identity as a woman, Roma, feminist, intellectual, and activist. They often address history, collective memory, and particularly the archaeology of the Roma culture. In 2018, she became the laureate of the Oskár Čepan Award.

#47 Make Voices Be Heard

“Let everyone be heard” is another way of putting the message of this issue tied to this year’s Fotograf Festival of the same name, the guest curators of which are Noemi Smolik and Adam Vačkář. Its motivation is to give space to voices that primarily come from the eastern part of the old continent, which, in our experience, tend to go unheard.