Writing about Polish Romani visual artist, activist, and educator Małgorzata Mirga-Tas often involves using the word "first": she was indeed the first Roma artist to represent Poland - or any nation - at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Currently, her first major UK museum exhibition is on view at Tate St Ives in Cornwall (in collaboration with the Whitworth, until January 5, 2025), and she is also the first Romani artist with work acquired by Tate's collection. Notably, she remains the only professionally trained Roma female artist in Poland whose art portrays Romani people - especially women - depicting their intimate lives and daily experiences.
Born in Zakopane, Poland, in 1978, Mirga-Tas grew up in Czarna Góra, in a Bergitka Roma community at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, where she still lives and works. Although she studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, her work centers on textiles. Mirga-Tas creates indeed vivid tapestries and textile-based artworks at times stitching them onto foldable screens, weaving in this way narratives that celebrate her community.
Through a feminist lens, her work challenges stereotypes of the Roma, capturing joyous scenes of her family and friends from Czarna Góra, a community that comes alive in her art through rich colors and personal storytelling.
The Romani people, or Roma, are a transnational ethnic minority with varied sub-groups. Once nomadic, they are now largely settled across Europe. Originally misidentified as Egyptian, leading to the term "Gypsies", the Roma actually migrated from northern India's Rajasthan region, reaching Europe by the 13th or 14th century. Over time, they have faced significant discrimination, including deportation, forced labor, sterilization, and slavery, particularly in Wallachia and Moldavia (now Romania) from the 13th to 19th centuries.
The exhibition at Tate St Ives showcases over 25 works by Mirga-Tas, including six new pieces debuting for the first time. Mirga-Tas celebrates Romani culture through tapestries that feature themes like music, with portraits of Andalusian Romani flamenco performers Juana Vargas de las Heras and Herminia Borja portrayed in powerful, dynamic poses in "The Sacristy of Gitanas Flamencas" series.
Other works depict Romani journeys, such as "Dromeskri Zuta" (On the Journey, 2024), showing travelers with a cart, and "Out of Egypt" (2021), portraying a woman carrying her belongings alongside her children. Horses, dogs, and birds add movement and vitality to these scenes.
Mirga-Tas's works not only represent Romani people but also incorporate personal materials gathered from family and friends - scraps of clothing, handkerchiefs, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets, even jewelry and buttons, which she calls "microcarriers of history".
These fragments create intimate, textured portraits, with figures wearing voluminous skirts and donning fringed shawls that create textile disruptions as they add a three-dimensional element to the tapestry.
Community is central to many pieces and the portraits of family members and collaborators (often from her Bergitka Roma community, a reference that gives the works a sense of closeness and connection), historical figures, activists, and artists are based on contemporary and historical photographs.
For example, "The Three Graces" (2021), inspired by an '80s photograph by her uncle Andrzej Mirga, Poland's first Romani ethnographer, pays homage to the women in her family while merging Roma identity with classical art motifs.
In one piece, "After Gentile da Fabriano", Mirga-Tas reimagines the "Adoration of the Magi", depicting a woman holding a child among other women at work, a reinterpretation that places Roma people within the context of iconic art history, reclaiming and celebrating Romani identity by transforming them into subjects of renowned artworks.
Historically, representations of Roma people in art were often racist and stereotypical, created from a colonial or ethnographic perspective by non-Romani artists. Works like Jacques Callot's "The Gypsies" engravings (c. 1621 - 31) and Auguste Raffet's 1830s paintings typically depicted the Roma as vagrants, thieves, or fortune tellers, reinforcing stigmatizing ideas. These portrayals spread and normalized negative stereotypes about the Roma.
Mirga-Tas challenges these depictions by referencing classical European art in her work, introducing Roma-made perspectives into the art historical narrative. She uses large-scale compositions that mimic 17th-century tapestries to subvert old stereotypes and offer a more authentic representation of Romani culture.
For example, in "June" - one of 12 panels from her series "Re-enchanting the World" (2022), created for the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale - Mirga-Tas draws inspiration from the fresco cycle representing the twelve months of the year at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy.
Centered around a playful lobster symbolizing Cancer, the panel contrasts a historic Roma camp scene above, with food cooking over a fire, against contemporary Roma women hanging laundry below. On the left, she reimagines a nameless girl carrying a child as a "Roma Madonna".
Through this approach, the artist seeks to foster respect for Roma people by showing the beauty and dignity of their lives rendered in joyful colors. Mirga Tas's works also include ingenious details: a three-panel screen features her mother sitting on a plastic chair, surrounded by chickens, and if you turn around it, you will see the same scene framed from behind.
Mirga-Tas also addresses tragic history, particularly the Romani Holocaust, in her series "Siukar Manusia", meaning "Wonderful People" and comprising six portraits. During WWII, Nazi Germany and collaborators systematically murdered over 500,000 Roma, (exact numbers remain contested).
In this series, Mirga-Tas created portraits of Holocaust survivors who later became activists, musicians, and community leaders in Nowa Huta, a post-war industrial city in Kraków, where many had moved for work. These portraits, based on family photographs and archives like the USC Shoah Foundation and the Fortunoff Archive, were crafted collaboratively with the subjects or their families, incorporating textiles to reflect individual personalities.
One such portrait features violinist Augustyn Gabor with his young daughter on his lap and a cat nestled under his chair. Another depicts Krystyna Gil, a concentration camp survivor who later founded a Romani women's association, in a brightly colored blue skirt with vivid pink and red flowers. In one portrait, Anna Gil sits with a bouquet of flowers next to her husband Jan.
Set against dark backgrounds, the figures seem to emerge from obscurity, symbolizing a return to visibility and dignity, the vibrant colors of their clothes adding texture and life to each scene.
A significant aspect of Mirga-Tas’ works is that the community is not only the subject, but also the engine of her works: the artist works indeed in collaboration with other local women, including family members, in her studio in Szaflar, actively involving them in the creative process.
This participatory process turns the studio into a communal space and encourages community involvement, bringing authenticity to the tapestries that, challenging stereotypes, give dignity, pride, and visibility to Romani culture, writing through fabrics and thread an alternative history and iconography for Europe's Roma populations.
Image credits for this post
1. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Dromeskri Zuta / On the Journey, 2024. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of the artist and Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław. Photo: Marek Gardulski
2. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Out of Egypt, from the series Out of Egypt, 2021. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Karma International, Zurich. Photo: Marek Gardulski
3. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas Kovaci / Blacksmiths, 2024. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of the artist and the Lito and Kim Camacho Collection. Photo: Marcin Tas
4. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, The Three Graces, 2021. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Presented to Tate by the artist in 2022. Photo: Marek Gardulski
5. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Untitled (After Gentile da Fabriano), 2023 installation view at Tate St Ives 2024. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)
6. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Romani Kali Daj (Roma Madonna), 2024, June, 2022 and Ćhajengri Duma (Women's Thoughts, 2024) © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)
7. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Roma Pasio Peskro Khier / Roma in front of the house, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and KADIST Collection. Photo Marek Gardulski
8 and 9. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, My Mother, 2019. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee 2021. Exhibition View, I Have a Dream, Goteborgs Konsthall, 2023. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler
10 and 11. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Sewn with Threads, 2019. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of Tate. Purchased with funds provided by the Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee 2021. Exhibition view I Have a Dream, Goteborgs Konsthall, 2023. Photo: Hendrik Zeitler
12. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Anna and Jan Gil, from the series Siukar Manusia, 2022. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Karma International, Zurich. Photo: Marek Gardulski
13. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Krystyna Gil, from the series Siukar Manusia, 2022 installation view at Tate St Ives 2024. © Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)
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