Kiba Lumberg is a Finnish Romani artist, writer, gallery owner and human rights activist from the Kale group. She studied music and fine arts in Helsinki.
Her criticism of patriarchy accompanied by violence against women, so frequent in her closed original culture, as well as her openly lesbian identity, earned her the status of an outcast among the Kale and even led to attempts on her life. She first attracted attention with her screenplay for the television miniseries Dark and Bright Blood (1997), set in a Romani community. Her installation Black Butterfly became the symbol of the first Romani pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Her autobiographical trilogy Memesa (Sammakko 2011) gradually explores her Romani, lesbian, and artistic identities. She exhibits around the world, draws comics, writes novels, and strives through all her work to contribute to mutual understanding between Romani people and the non-Romani majority. Her work often draws on her childhood spent within this extremely conservative community, from which she fled under dramatic circumstances at the age of thirteen.
Photo: the author's private archive
