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).

Curator: Andreas Beitin, Curatorial Assistant: Veronika Mehlhart