Born in Austria, into the Lovara Roma community, Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is a self-taught artist, author, painter and draughtswoman. A survivor of the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, where she lived from 1943 to 1945 at the age of 10 or 12, she was one of the first to bear witness to the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies, more than forty years after the events. She first published a book, "Nous vivons cachés. Récits d'une Romni à travers le siècle", in 1988. The following year, she took up painting, an activity she continued until the last years of her life, creating around a thousand paintings and drawings in the space of 25 years.
Ceija Stojka is an internationally acclaimed artist today, as well as an emblematic figure of the Roma people and their extermination during the Second World War. The exhibition presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie in Besançon, co-curated with the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, invites the public to discover this woman artist through an approach combining art and history, aesthetics and memory.
Ceija Stojka is an internationally acclaimed artist today, as well as an emblematic figure of the Roma people and their extermination during the Second World War. The exhibition presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie in Besançon, co-curated with the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, invites the public to discover this woman artist through an approach combining art and history, aesthetics and memory.
