Russian forces continue to enter Ukraine and it is estimated that more than a million Ukrainians fled to neighboring countries to escape the invasion. The United Nations refugee agency stated that the number could soar to more than 4 million in coming months.
The European Union approved in the meantime an emergency plan to offer Temporary Protection to Ukrainian refugees and to third country nationals with refugee or permanent residence status in Ukraine.
Poland welcomed the highest number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the Russian invasion. Many Ukrainians moved to Poland after the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine and many of those travelling to Poland now are joining friends and family already living there.
Poland feels this war is very close to them not just for proximity reasons (there was shelling close to the Polish border), but also because, at this stage, there are fears the conflict may extend. So, to focus the attention also on Poland, a country that is warmly welcoming at the moment Ukrainian refugees, let's look at an artist living and working there, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
The Polish Romani artist and activist is currently having her first exhibition, entitled "Screen test", in Austria at Vienna's Kahán Art Space (until 30th April; the exhibition will then move from May to June in the gallery's branch in Budapest), but she will also represent Poland at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Born in Zakopane in 1978, the artist studied at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, yet her practice doesn't focus on sculpture. Mirga-Tas paints indeed with scraps of textiles on a variety of spatial objects including screens.
Her favourite subjects are the lives of Poland's Romani communities represented with joyous illustrations of the artist's family members and friends in her home of Czarna Góra, in the south of the Małopolska region, one of the longest settled Romani communities in Eastern Europe.
Through her works the artist examines anti-Romani stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities.
But there is also something very intimate about her works: the textiles used to create her portraits are taken from the clothing, curtains, and tablecloths that once belonged to the persons that feature in her portraits, especially women, members of her own Bergitka Roma tribe.
The highly layered and intricate works are decorated with elements such as sequins and feathers that contribute to create a narrative about her own life and relationships and more widely about minority communities.
Mirga-Tas is a unique artist as she is the first - and so far the only - professionally trained Roma female artist in Poland whose work deals with portraying the Roma (especially Romani women), their intimate lives, and every-day reality.
But there are also other reasons why her portraits are important: self-portraits by the Roma have been absent for centuries in European visual culture (until the 20th century practically all images of the Roma were made by non-Roma); besides, the representations of the Roma were often stereotypical and racist, often done from a colonial and ethnographic point of view.
Her exhibition at Kahán Art Space features works made with different techniques: "Kie Serina" (2017) is a painting based on the collage technique and inspired by a photograph taken by her uncle Andrzej Mirga in which two women and a man play cards and integrates fabrics and real cards; others like her three-dimensional triptychs inspired by her beloved grandmother ("Baba Józka", 2019) and aunts ("Bibi Helena" and "Bibi Ibrona", both from 2019), are inspired by the religious artistic tradition of her region.
Mirga-Tas seems to excel in the large-format tapestry-like textile pieces often representing Roma women working or engaged in collective activities such as sewing.
"Romnija Siwen" (2021) is, for example, a collective portrait and shows the artist herself (in the foreground), with her mother Grażyna Mirga, as well as her aunt Stanisława Mirga, with whom the artist often works.
In the series "Face Value" (2021), which the artist originally created for her show at the Tartu Art House in Estonia last year she portrayed persons from two Roma communities - her own and one based in Estonia, to which she was introduced during her stay in Tartu. Although geographically and socially distant, in Mirga-Tas' works the two communities were reunited.
In this way, the two sides of the screens dedicated to the two communities become part of a single story about the transnational community and heritage of the European Roma. Who knows, maybe Mirga-Tas will be inspired by the current crisis and one day offer us one of her transnational tapestries to remind us we may come from different places, but we are all part of the same human race.
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