Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. An Alternative Story

Family, community, solida­rity, and self-empower­ment, as well as exclusion and perse­cu­tion, are the defining themes in the work of the artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (born 1978 in Zakopane, Poland). Through her textile “paintings,” she connects the past and the present and tells a different, alter­na­tive story of unseen and margi­na­lized people.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas focuses on the lives of the Romani people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, who have been margi­na­lized, discri­mi­nated against, and perse­cuted in Europe since the fourte­enth century—and often still are today. Through her visually powerful combi­na­tion of different textiles and patterns, she paints an intimate picture of the everyday life of the Romani, often linked to histo­rical narra­tives that frequently perpe­tuate stereo­types as external repre­sen­ta­tions. Mirga-Tas contrasts her powerful and sensitive images with the negative and stereo­ty­pical percep­tions of Romani people that still prevail today. In doing so, she brings to the fore voices and stories that are otherwise rarely heard.

For Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the perspec­tive of women in parti­cular plays an important role—in the sense of a herstory. Thus, well-known public figures from the Romani community frequently appear in her work. Mirga-Tas, a Romani activist herself, also devotes herself inten­si­vely to the women in her immediate environ­ment, including her friends and family members, such as her aunts and grandmother.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s works, some of which are large-format, are created in a collec­tive process that begins with the material itself. The artist uses clothing and household textiles, such as curtains and towels, that she collects from her surroun­dings. She works with mostly used fabrics that already carry the stories of their previous owners. This lends her pictures a certain double authen­ti­city. Together with other women from her community, Mirga-Tas carefully assembles the textiles to create her colorful works.

With this exhibi­tion, the Kunst­mu­seum Wolfsburg is showing the work of this extra­or­di­nary artist on this scale for the first time in Germany, including almost the entire cycle Re-enchan­ting the World, with which Małgorzata Mirga-Tas caused an inter­na­tional sensation since her appearance in the Polish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. There, she became the first Romani artist to exhibit in a national pavilion.

The exhibi­tion was created in close colla­bo­ra­tion with Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and is an inter­na­tional coope­ra­tion with the Kunst­mu­seum Luzern (Switz­er­land) and the Henie Onstad Kunst­senter (Norway).

Hersto­ries, 2019—2025

The larger-than-life portraits of Roma heroines are part of the series Hersto­ries, in which Małgorzata Mirga-Tas immor­ta­lize women from the Roma community.

Some of the Roma women depicted here are well known, like the composer and singer Esma Redžepova, the artist Delaine Le Bas, and Nicoleta Bitu, president of the Democratic Union of the Roma of Romania. Others are friends or relatives of the artist from Czarna Góra and the surroun­ding villages, who helped Małgorzata Mirga-Tas during the process of sewing her works.

The title Hersto­ries alludes to the kind of histo­rio­graphy dominated by men. Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s developed the concept of “herstory” as distin­guished from “history”. This play on the words “his” versus “her” unders­cores the need for the histo­rical achie­ve­ments of women to be made visible. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ Hersto­ries consti­tute an archive of Roma women who have released themselves from patri­ar­chal struc­tures to resolutely occupy space — within the Roma community and in this exhibition.

Paravents, 2021–2025

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas transfers her textile depic­tions of scenes from everyday life in the Roma community to paravents. The word “paravent” is from the Italian “paravento”, meaning protec­tion against the wind. Used as a partition, a paravent also shields people from the gaze of others and separates the private and the public spheres. In addition to its archi­tec­tural function, it can also be used as a decora­tive element. In the past, a paravent often served as a prestige object denoting wealth and power. By using the paravent as an image carrier, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas again raises the questions of what we see and what is concealed from our sight.

Her paravents show scenes from everyday life: women meeting while on a walk, or three Roma women sitting on cushions in an interior space; their similar facial features suggest that they are daughter, mother and grand­mo­ther. The third paravent bears the Romani title Siukar Graja (Beautiful Horses) and indicates the signi­fi­cance of horses for the Roma. Many Roma were horse traders and the Sinti regard horses as sacred. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas herself can be seen on some of her paravents, as she occasio­nally includes a self-portrait in these everyday scenes.

Noncia, 2022

This animated film pays homage to Noncia — the call name of the Roma heroine and Holocaust survivor Alfreda Noncia Markowska (1926–2021). During the Second World War she saved about fifty children from death in National Socialist Germany.

From a first-person perspec­tive, a woman’s voice reports on being captured by members of the National Socialist occupying regime in autumn 1942. She speaks about her journey to the Majdanek concen­tra­tion and exter­mi­na­tion camp near Lublin, telling us how at one railway station a woman secretly passed her baby to her through the train window. The protago­nist, Noncia, is herself only sixteen years old when she takes charge of that child. In Lublin, Noncia manages to flee together with the baby and a number of other children. They find protec­tion in the woods, but they also come upon many more Roma and Jewish children in destroyed tent camps and abandoned mass graves. Until the end of the war, Noncia takes care of the almost fifty children in the woods.

With these animated textile collages, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas makes Noncia’s history known and honors her heroic actions, which were acknow­ledged by her being awarded Poland’s highest state order, the Order of Polonia Restituta.

RomaMoMA

RomaMoMA, a joint initia­tive of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) and OFF-Biennale Budapest, is a contem­porary art project initia­ting a forum for colla­bo­ra­tive reflec­tion on a future Roma Museum of Contem­porary Art. By involving stake­holder commu­nities and explo­i­ting the possi­bi­li­ties of collec­tive thinking and discourse, as well as the critical and discur­sive poten­tials of modern art, it – “prefi­gu­ra­tively” – “creates” itself. It is an imagined and natural space home to both Roma arts and artists. Rather than the realiz­a­tion of a specific museum concept, the project connects a range of programs (exhibi­tions, film scree­nings, perfor­mances, workshops, etc.), modeling nomadic, flexible insti­tu­tional operation, which raises questions about the devices of contem­porary art.

RomaMoMA Nomadic Library

The RomaMoMA Library was created in 2021 to comme­mo­rate the fiftieth anniver­sary of the First World Romani Congress. It is dynamic and nomadic, engaging with local contexts wherever it travels. Compri­sing some 100 books on contem­porary Roma literary, artistic and cultural heritage, the library’s growing collec­tion showcases this rich Roma legacy, while criti­cally inter­ro­ga­ting the violence and oppres­sion against the Roma in Europe.

The RomaMoMA Library is activated through Adjacent, the mobile knowledge device conceived for RomaMoMA by British Romani artist Daniel Baker: Adjacent is a table with a black and white barcode of We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contem­porary Art. As the artist explains: “The concept title refers not only to the parallel lines that form the code, but also symbo­lises the act of standing side by side with our colla­bo­ra­tors in our fight for equality”.

Re-enchan­ting the World, 2022

This monumental work tells the story of the Roma from a feminist, decolo­nial and anti-racist point of view.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas makes reference to the frescoes in Palazzo Schifa­noia in Ferrara, Italy. These Renais­sance works depict the course of the year: the frescoes are divided into three horizontal bands, with a fresco for each month. The depic­tions include gods from Greek mythology and the ancient Orient, signs of the zodiac and everyday scenes. According to the art historian Aby Warburg, the images in Ferrara’s Hall of the Months are a clear indicator of the rever­be­ra­tions of Antiquity in the Renais­sance. His research on the frescoes and other works of art provided funda­mental insights into the history of European art.

For this very reason, these frescoes also inspired Małgorzata Mirga-Tas to create her cycles of images. Instead of heavenly or earthly scenes from the ancient pictorial program, the artist presents her own Roma community, which includes over 10 million people in Europe. In the top band she tells us about the arrival of the Roma in Europe. The middle band intro­duces the power of women; the artist presents Roma heroines along with the signs of the zodiac unders­co­ring these figures’ strength. The bottom band shows scenes from the everyday life of the Roma in the province of Lesser Poland, where the artist lives with her family. The colourful fabrics are from worn items of clothing donated by the artist’s friends and family members and sewn in a joint effort so as to produce these collages. The title Re-enchan­ting the World cites a standard work by the feminist author Silvia Federici, in which she describes, from a feminist viewpoint, the destruc­tion of commu­nities through the rise of capitalism.