The painting on the canvas is of a man playing chess with a robot. The color on his face is still damp and glistening. Norbert Olah was working into the early hours: The Bura Galeria in Budapest has been his studio all summer. He finds it easiest to concentrate at night, when the Hungarian capital gradually falls silent.
Olah has taped foil and cardboard over the tiled floor at the back of the gallery. Pots of brushes, tubes of paint, pencil sketches, and, over and over again, pictures that include the blue-and-green Roma flag line the room.
Norbert Olah is an artist. He's also Romani. For a long time, he deliberately left this part of his identity out of his art. Not because his ethnicity wasn't important to him, but because he didn't want to be labeled a "Romani artist."
"There are so many prejudices about Roma culture and Roma art," Olah says. "The art scene regards it as naïve, unprofessional, unsophisticated, and kitsch."
But the older Olah got, the harder he found it to ignore his own story in his art. Especially in a country in which being Romani is not just an ethnicity but a political reality.
Life under Orban
The first time Viktor Orban's Fidesz party won an absolute majority in the Hungarian parliamentary elections of 2010, Olah had just finished school and was starting his art course at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. At a time of life when the world ought to be opening up, Olah felt more and more barriers were being erected.
Olah was directly affected by Hungary's political reorientation, as both an artist and a Romani. Politics co-opted the cultural scene and made it toe the party line. Roma became the target of hateful rhetoric, including from the prime minister himself. Orban repeatedly called attention to himself with racist comments about Roma.
For the 16 years Orban was in power, Hungary's Roma population, estimated to be around 700,000 people, was caught between official promises of integration and persistent marginalization. Orban's government introduced a state employment program that hired predominantly Romani workers. But instead of helping them gain a foothold in the job market, many Romani found themselves trapped in insecure, poorly paid, temporary jobs. The government did little to implement real change. Romani in Hungary are still disproportionately affected by poverty and social exclusion.
There came a point when Norbert Olah felt he could no longer stand by and do nothing.
Other people's prejudices
In 2021, during Hungary's biggest independent contemporary art event, the OFF-Biennale Budapest, Olah and his father laid a brick wall directly in front of the entrance to the building that had housed the Roma Parliament, a Roma cultural center with an art collection, archive, library, and events program. The Orban government evicted it in 2016, saying the building was structurally dangerous and promising to repurpose it as a national Roma center. It has stood empty ever since.
The title of Olah's work was "The Romani Artist's Fears." Words like "integration," "assimilation," and "segregation" were chiseled into the bricks. A few weeks later, Olah staged a performance in which he took a sledgehammer to his artwork and smashed it till it collapsed.
In an accompanying text, Olah wrote publicly for the first time about the fears, prejudices, and expectations he encounters as an artist with Roma roots. The text is full of questions. Should a Romani artist's work focus on topics relevant to Roma? What is the relationship between ethnicity and aesthetics? Would people only contact an artist with Roma roots if they were specifically looking for a Romani artist, or would they do so if they needed a Hungarian artist, too?
"Of course we're always looking for answers. But sometimes it's more interesting to look at the question itself," says Olah, picking a piece of crepe masking tape off the floor. "If it feels uncomfortable, it's a good question."
And so Olah has created a new label for Romani artists. The Bura Galeria, established by Romani activists in 2021 in Budapest's District 8, has become the place for it: A platform for contemporary Roma art.
"We're not asking to be accepted by the art scene," said Olah. "We're opening the door and inviting others in."
Open antiziganism
Identity and exclusion, power and the misuse of power — these became central themes for Olah's artistic work. He had no lack of inspiration during the Orban years.
Although Fidesz's policies were hardly favorable to Roma, Orban's party could, for a long time, count on Roma votes — for example, because local employment programs enabled local politicians to pressure socially underprivileged voters. There were also many documented cases of vote-buying. Fidesz was so confident that the majority of Roma would continue to vote for it that it openly fueled the antiziganism still widespread in Hungarian society.
Shortly before the election in April 2026, Fidesz's Janos Lazar, who was minister for transport at the time, spoke out against labor migration with the argument that Hungary still had "domestic reserves," like the Roma, who could "clean the crap out of overflowing toilets" on Intercity trains. The scene appears in Olah's art: A fake election poster depicts a man in a balaclava sitting on a golden toilet, brandishing a toilet brush, with the slogan underneath: "Gypsy Criminals for President."
Opportunity for real change?
Gypsy Criminals is also the name of the artists' collective Olah founded in 2024, along with a friend of his and his miniature pinscher. The term comes from Hungarian crime statistics, and has been used since the 2000s by right-wing politicians to imply that all Roma are criminals. The name is ironic, like many aspects of Olah's work.
Analyses by the foundation Roma for Democracy show that many Roma did not vote for Orban's Fidesz party in the April 2026 parliamentary election. Orban's successor, Peter Magyar, adopted a different tone in relation to Roma as part of his election campaign. He met with members of the Roma minority, and his election manifesto contained a specific paragraph about equal opportunities for Roma. Four of the Tisza party's nine new members of parliament are Romani. One was even elected a deputy speaker of parliament.
Since the election, there has been cautious optimism that the precarious situation of many Roma in Hungary could finally change. On the other hand, nothing has fundamentally changed in the four months since the election, apart from the tone when talking about the ethnic minority. "What I'm seeing right now are mostly symbolic gestures," says Olah.
Roma on Mars
Some of his friends in the more liberal art scene are growing impatient. They would like to see Magyar take a much more liberal course, but Olah is a realist.
"He's a conservative politician," he says. "We elected him to put an end to the Orban system. He didn't promise any more than that." But the election in April was an opportunity for a fresh political start, he adds. "I think in the long run we will live in a normal society again, led by a normal government, that will do some things well and others not so well. As an artist, it will be my job to criticize that."
Olah's work also considers the future. The first pictures for his next project are already up on the wall in his studio. It's Roma futurism: A Romani couple strolling on Mars; a blue-and-green Roma flag on the moon; a weightless astronaut with a traditional Cegled water jug, used by Romani musicians as a percussion instrument. Olah is also planning a two-meter-high space station in the shape of a cartwheel, a symbol of the Romani people.
For Olah, space travel is also a metaphor for social advancement — the desire of people and communities to overcome the barriers they face as a result of their origins, or poverty, or life in a minority. Again, he is asking questions. What if a society were fundamentally recreated from the beginning? If aliens encountered Roma, would they do so without prejudice? What remains of an identity if everything about it changes?
Olah shreds the masking tape between his fingers. More unanswered questions. But that's exactly what makes them so interesting.
