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The outsider’s views are exposed as what they are - misleading and reductionist.

Below Tomaszewski’s lascivious dancer, a documentary explains the strict codes around female modesty in Roma culture. Above Weber’s fashion shoot, small black-and-white photographs show Romas in the Belzec extermination camp. Looking more closely, however, cracks appear in the clichés.

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From afar, the themes seem familiar: the free Gypsy man, whether from a 19th-century drawing of a musician (Karol Mlodnicki, ‘Gypsy musician’, 1860) or a modern photograph of a barefoot man riding a horse (Jerzy Dorozynski, ‘Bareback, barefoot, to the waterhole’, 1960) the hot-blooded Gypsy woman, as in Tomasz Tomaszewski’s photograph of a Roma dancing in the street (strongly reminiscent of Jennifer Lopez’ 2001 video clip to ‘Ain’t it Funny’), or Bruce Weber’s fashion editorial for US Vogue featuring the Almodóvar actress Rossy di Palma pirouetting around a camp fire (‘Gypsy Soul’, April 1992, US Vogue). In a bright space a range of images form giant, colourful collages on the walls. The next section could not be more different. Following this year’s violent attempts to expel Roma from several cities in Poland, the message rings more true than ever. With the neon’s letter ‘P’ bearing the nationalistic sign of the Warsaw Uprising and the letter ‘o’ doubling as an Iron Cross, it also confronts the visitor with ignored aspects of history such as the Roma Holocaust. ‘Our identity is increasingly made up of negations’, the artist seems to say. In the dim and oppressive light of the show’s first room, Hubert Czerepok’s blue neon ‘Nigdy Nie Bedziesz Polakiem’ (You will never be a Pole) glows from a naked wall. The result is powerful, an exercise - the first of its kind in Eastern Europe - of curatorial sensibility taking on social and cultural prejudice. Borrowing its title from Polish-Roma poet Papusza, ‘Houses As Silver As Tents’ makes a point of contrasting the perspective of Roma artists with depictions by outsiders.

The latest show in Warsaw’s Zacheta National Gallery of Art is a journey into the notion of ‘Gypsiness’. ‘Elusive visibility has long been the gift of the Roma, but if we are to effectively challenge the status quo, we now need to privilege the visible over the elusive.’