“You envied me. So I went on the World Wide Web..."

OMARA (MARA OLÁH, born 3 September 1945, Monor, Hungary) is a painter living and working in Monor. A self-taught artist, she started painting at the age of 43 following her mother’s death. Using art as a therapeutic tool to overcome and come to terms with humiliation, the grief felt over losing her mother, the anguish of alienation from her daughter and the physical pain of her cancer, her paintings show the major traumas of her life. In 1991 she took one of her paintings – exploring her experience of her eye surgery – to the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, and has been encouraged by the Gallery’s professionals, since then she continued to paint and started to exhibit her work. Since 1992 her pictures feature inscriptions, as a result of a misunderstanding surrounding one of her works at an exhibition in Szeged: a painting representing a real occurrence, Mara on all fours looking for her glass eye in the grass, was presented as »Mara Resting,« while a double portrait of Omara and her sister was put on display as »Lesbians.« Her series of blue pictures, the first appearing in 1997, show the difficulties, racism and discrimination she faced throughout her life. In her autobiography she says: »Blue was always the colour of my daughter, blue was her best dress when she was a little girl, she wanted her room to be painted blue when she grew up, it was her favourite. […] In 1997 I had a dream which told me I should paint the picture I was to give to my daughter on her name day in blue. I could hardly wait to lay my hands on the paint and the boards. I had ice blue and white at home. And what did I paint? Myself with my hand on my heart, bowing deeply, thanking God for creating this in my dream. My daughter is the person I love most in the world, and this way I could make my girl’s dream come true.« Painted in various tones of blue and complemented with textual explanations, the blue pictures are confessions about the artist’s most important personal experiences, her relationship with her daughter, her ordeals as a Roma and a woman. The inscriptions not only verbalise the pictures’ narratives, but they also reflect on their significance regarding the present and the future (e.g. her work »Mara and the Policeman«). The texts featuring in her paintings have a key role to play: this language is in itself productive, performative and constitutive. It is an act that defines and marks what does it mean to be a Roma woman to Omara, similarly to the feminist ideas of Judith Butler and John L. Austin: they are statements that do not communicate facts, they are not true or false, but Omara performs actions through them. Omara’s practice is a politically conscious, activist art and aims to represent Roma interests, challenging norms and conformity, and the system which created the rules. She does not confine herself within visual arts: she speak out through actions and statements she makes on television, in printed and electronic journals. She also regularly visits prisons to talk to the inmates about the life of the Roma on the »outside«. In 1993 she opened Hungary’s very first private art gallery in her home in Kispest, and in 1997 she self-published her autobiography »OMara festőművész« [Painter Omara] in Szolnok. Most recently she has been exhibited at Documenta15 in Kassel Romarchive "When Omara first met millionaire George Soros at the 52nd Venice Biennale Roma Pavilion of the Roma Pavilion in 2007, he shook hands with Soros and took out his fake eye, placing it in the palm of Soros' hand and said, "Thank you for your support, I am very grateful, I wish I had everything I have. I wish I could give you everything. " This moment has changed the way we think about Omara's art and will have an impact on the way we think about interpretation and reception of contemporary Roma art in the future. Up to this point, Omara has been known as an amateur Roma painter, but this event has highlighted the problem of Omara's actions, media appearances and performances had not until this point been seen and understood as integral parts of the artistic oeuvre. Considering that Omara had participated in the Venice Biennale and then in the 2009 international exhibition Gender Check, organised by the renowned curator Bojana Pejic, and in view of the her work is regularly featured in national and international conferences, symposia and exhibitions (most recently on the cover of the Swedish Cora (feminist) Cultural Magazine) we can say that Omara is an internationally known Hungarian woman artist who is a Roma origin... Omara's artistic career is a perfect illustration of the structural oppression of Roma and is also a perfect example of how this oppression can be countered how to rebel against this oppression, how to radically create a new Roma identity by rejecting the dominance of the majority a new Roma identity. The machinery that shaped the Hungarian and later the European canon: the academy, the art historians, the sociologists, cultural anthropologists and the various guidelines were all programmed to do so, to see only his oil paintings as newer objects of the naïve painting tradition. Omara's art is still excluded from the contemporary art world (canon), in which he appears as an outsider. He is also in the integral part of the system, it appears in the (artistic, political, academic) system as incoherence, a threat or an element that endangers the systematic functioning of the system." Tímea Junghaus