WORKS BY ROMANI
ARTIST CEIJA STOJKA AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (MSN)
Warsaw Ghetto Museum
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites visitors to the exhibition “The Women Question 1550–2025,” presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw since November 21, 2025. Among the works of nearly 150 women artists, the exhibition features paintings by the Romani artist Ceija Stojka from the collection of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum: Dressage (2001) and Quand les corbeaux ont faim, ils viennent sur la terre (When the crows are hungry, they come down to earth, 2001).
Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Kraubath, Austria. She was ten years old when she, together with her mother and five siblings, was deported to KL Auschwitz, to the Zigeunerlager—the so-called “Gypsy camp” established in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where Roma and Sinti families from across Europe were imprisoned from 1943 onward. She was later transferred to the Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen camps. Out of her extended family of around two hundred people, only she, her mother, and four siblings survived the war.
More than forty years after the end of the war, Ceija Stojka broke her silence. In 1988, her first book “Wir leben im Verborgenen” (We live in seclusion) was published. She also began to paint, developing a distinctive artistic language marked by sensitive color palettes, symbolic compositions, and strong emotional expression. She was 55 years old at the time.
The two works from the Warsaw Ghetto Museum collection presented in the exhibition are powerful documents of the Romani experience of extermination, created by
a Survivor. In Dressage, a tightly compressed group of women is confronted by two black figures shown from behind. Next to one sits a black dog, and a whip lies on the snow-covered ground. In Quand les corbeaux ont faim, ils viennent sur la terre, a group of crowded women prisoners faces a female guard striking a bent woman in a black dress with
a sweeping motion of a whip. The scene’s dynamism is intensified by the silhouettes of black birds against the sky.
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The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw runs until May 3, 2026. Curated by art historian Alison M. Gingeras, it challenges the myth of women artists’ absence from art history.
Structured as a nine-part visual narrative, it testifies to the enduring and dynamic creative presence of women over the last 500 years.