Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at Tate, St Ives: An Ode To The Sorrowful Yet Gorgeous Lives Of The Czarna Góra Roma

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas made history at the 2022 Venice Biennale, as the first Romani artist to represent her country at an international festival. This autumn, she presents her first major UK Exhibition at Tate, St Ives, Cornwall and becomes the first Romani artist to have their works acquired by Tate for its collection.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, z cyklu Wyjście z Egiptu / 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.

Renowned for her gorgeous textile collages created using materials collected from her friends and family, in Mirga-Tas’s hands, everyday items take on new life as ‘microcarriers of history’, beacons of hope and prophets of a better future. Often created in collaboration with other women, each work is a smorgasbord of sentiment designed to highlight the exceptionalism she sees in her quotidian. In a Mirga-Tas artwork, curtains, sheets, jewellery, and handkerchiefs are deconstructed and transformed, suspended in time as a subset of the abstract, whilst maintaining such a unique realism that it highlights the artists own authenticity.

Mirga-Tas’s work is visual activism, and she combines multiple formats of media to produce a pseudo-sensory experience that transports the reader into her heart - her community. The Polish artist enshrines the beauty of her world into the art she creates, immortalising her family members, her friends, and those that champion Roma wellbeing into brilliant artworks; works whose vibrancy re-imagine the story of her people into one where their agency over their own depiction is never in question. 

The artwork is stark, but never bleak. It is story upon story of hope in the face of adversity, joy in the face of injustice, and beauty that perseveres in times of cruelty.

Mirga-Tas’s exhibition at the Tate consists of over 25 of her works, including six new pieces on display for the first time. Notable works include a maximalist fabric panel, created for the 59th Venice Biennale from her series, ‘Re-Enchanting the World’, and 6 beautiful commemorative portrait pieces from her series ‘Siukar Manusia’ depicting eminent first-generation Romani inhabitants of the Nowa Huta region in Eastern Krakow - many of them having suffered lives of great hardship - including survivors of Romani genocide.

There is a beauty in the playfulness of Mirga-Tas’ work. A gorgeousness to the depth she draws out of the mundane and a transcendence in the light she injects into even the darkest of subjects. She adorns her collages with sparkly trimmings, flowers with petals that have a life of their own, lampshades with their own tassels and shirts with real buttons, breathing life into her subjects and crowning them with the honour and dignity the world has not always afforded them.

Malgorzata Mirga-Tas is at Tate, St Ives until January 2025.