Today I am, tomorrow, the Minister will find someone else, says artist Rig
28. Mar 2025 at 15:16
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The exhibition was unexpectedly visited by Prime Minister Fico.
She has not yet experienced such a wave of het. Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová Last week, she published a video from her visit to the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), in which she criticized the exhibition of contemporary art, including the artist’s video installation Emílie Rigováthat returns gold on it.
The commentators did not spare negative attributes under the status of ministers on social networks. « Reading different vulgarisms was crazy, » says Rig. « Minister Magorna thousands of people who will say the court and talk about what to be in the gallery. At the same time they may never have been in the gallery, » he adds.
« It is me today, tomorrow the Minister will find someone else, » she says.
Unannounced Friday afternoon visited an exhibition of contemporary art in SNG and Prime Minister Robert Fico. He did not comment on his visit.
The interview was created before.
Rig is one of the most striking visual artists of the young generation. She holds the Oscar Čepan Award, she received international attention with an exhibition at the prestigious Vienna Museum of Modern Art. He has long drawn attention to the distortion of Roma identity in public awareness or social stereotypes.
Is currently on the residence in Portugalwhere it is waiting for the installation of hair that did not end up in fire. Hair is a symbol of repression and Rig will embroider the traditional Roma song where it sings: « Do not cut us over, I’d rather go to the camp. » Is a reference to Roma Holocaust.
In the interview you read:
- What is the story behind the installation of Vomit Ergo Sum!
- What reactions to the installation she encountered.
- How perceives the video of Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová.
- Whether she received a reaction from the Minister to the contribution she then wrote.
- Whether the Slovak society is ready for art that raises concern.
- How people can build a relationship to contemporary art.
- How the art of Roma in Slovakia has developed over the years.
Vomit Ergo Sum Vomit! It shows you how you are returning gold. Gold is a rare material in your installation, but at the same time a food that one is unable to spend under any circumstances. What is the story behind the installation?
Installation has several layers as well as interpretations. From the beginning I knew that I was encountering my private self into the project. I am from a stonemasonry family, my father taught me to work with gold since childhood. I am also from a Roma family and gold is present in the interior of my parents’ dwelling.
It is a kind of mirror. Whenever I come to my parents for Sunday lunch And I have to eat from a gilded plate and a gold cutlery, it’s a massacre for me.
When I started to meet other Roma in Europe, I realized that gold is not only in the household of my parents, but also other Roma in the neighboring countries. It is fascinating that if he came to ours to visit a Roma from Poland, he would feel at home in our country, because it looks similar to him.
I don’t want to, of course, flatize it to everyone. But you would find many Roma in Slovakia who surround themselves with jewelry and gold or similar furniture to my parents. Since I grew up in it, I could talk about Roma aesthetics today. After high school, I started to define this.
Gold symbolizes home for me, whether I want or not. It is one of the personal levels that the viewer may not know.
Isn’t it just a stereotype of the majority that it sees gold as a kind of props of Roma visual identity?
I think this will be the case until the generation of my parents leaves. My generation has a little different, but I see it returns again at the younger one.
They make a new jewelry that were once more flashy. Jewel as such is of great importance in the Roma community. Despite the fact that traditional culture has already disappeared, what was associated with jewelry in our community still lives. This is a symbol of prosperity.
It would be worthy of research, as the Roma influenced jewelry not only in our country, but also in other Eastern European countries, how they designed them how they worked with them.
What additional planes does the installation still have?
If we thought I was a Roma, there is still a woman who kneels on four and returns. This act itself is something for me to connect different layers of women and men. This is encoded, for example, how women experience menstruation or what they experience in pregnancy.
That’s why I liked the performance from the beginning. It has many layers and I understand gold as my own, semantic plane. The viewer can find his own explanation, for example that it is a symbol of consumerism.
Every performance is a test for me, a test for myself. When my father heard what I wanted to do, he went crazy: I can’t return the gold. At the same time, I did not realize that it could kill me. My father then helped me look for a substitute for the gold I could use. It returned me again to the time when he taught me different things from his craft. At the same time, I return to my family, from which I basically still run away when I work.
How did you perceive the criticism of your work by Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová?
Since I am in Portugal and I am quite busy, I learned about it later. Suddenly one curator from the gallery wrote to me to watch the profile of the Minister of Culture. At first I couldn’t even find it. The next morning I opened Facebook and the video was everywhere. I read the first two to three comments and I was physically sick. I knew I wanted to react.
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