Malgorzata Mirga-Tas: Tełe Ćerhenia Jekh Jag (Kunsthaus Bregenz)
Thomas D. Trummer (Ed.)
Buchhandlung Walther König, 2025
€42,00
The publication Małgorzata Mirga-Tas – Tełe Ćerhenia Jekh Jag explores the cultural and historical dimensions of the exhibition and offers personal insights into Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s collaborative practice.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s art is dedicated to the world of Roma culture. In her detailed, realistic depictions, she portrays everyday scenes – people smoking a cigarette, playing cards, or hanging up laundry. At Kunsthaus Bregenz, she is also presenting sculptures created especially for these rooms. They draw on mythical narratives and are at the same time symbols of the contemporary human condition.
Mirga-Tas gained international recognition in 2022 at the Venice Biennale, where she lined the Polish Pavilion with large-scale textile works. The three registers of images quote representations of months inspired by a famous Italian Renaissance fresco cycle: the calendar in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. The zodiac signs in the center of her work are flanked by near life-size portraits. The top, colorful frieze tells the story of the Roma and their exodus to Europe. It is a narrative of migration and nomadic life, brought to life in a depiction of historical clothing, animals, and expansive landscapes. The bottom register shows scenes of contemporary daily life – community, femininity, friendship, and family.
By reclaiming their own narratives, the Roma community breaks with the centuries-old images of the other projected onto them by sections of society. The technique of fabric collage picks up on Roma craftsmanship. Yet Mirga-Tas’s textile art is much more than a tribute to traditional women’s work. She elevates sewing to the rank of political practice. One of her pictures shows a self-portrait of her sewing outside with other women. These female figures are not passive actors, but protagonists of their own lives. In Mirga-Tas’s art, work appears not as a burden, but as a source of identity and community
Large-format reproductions of the new works created for Bregenz are combined with photographs documenting the collective process in the artist’s studio near Czarna Góra, resulting in an intimate visual narrative. Poems by Jan Mirga, the artist’s uncle—featured as a sound piece in the exhibition—are published here for the first time. In a conversation with Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka and KUB Director Thomas D. Trummer, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas reflects on her working methods and the themes explored in her art. Wojciech Szymański provides context on the artist’s cultural background, Ethel Brooks examines the intersection of art and political activism in Mirga-Tas’s work, and Thomas D. Trummer frames her textile collages as a poetic form of resistance that brings marginalized histories into view.
ISBN: 9783753308296
