Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

The catalogue accompanies the exhibition of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Roma-Polish artist and social activist, specialising in creating monumental installations, images, and collages out of textiles and clothes.

The book provides an overview of the artist’s works that deal with transnational identity of contemporary Roma people and their Polish history. One of the most important pieces is the series “Siukar Manusia” about the Romanies from Nowa Huta – prepared especially for the show in Kraków.

Working through anti-Roma stereotypes and biases constitutes an important theme of both the catalogue and the exhibition. Mirga-Tas makes this issue a focal point of her oeuvre. This is why the publication includes texts by contemporary researchers as well as reproductions of artworks created by artists from past centuries who depicted Roma as criminals and portrayed them in a sexualised or exotic way. Mirga-Tas confronts those images by telling a different story, showing private. family life unknown to strangers.

Researchers and art critics in their texts describe the history of Roma people: the Holocaust, the after-war reality, the story of their settlement in Nowa Huta. The most important are, however, the analyses of the work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, their artistic, political and social contexts viewed from different perspectives: postcolonial, feministic and ecological.
This book is the first such comprehensive analysis of the work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas – the laureate of Polityka’s Passport, Polish representative at the 59th Venice Biennale.

The publication is richly illustrated, it comprises 50 reproductions of works by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the reproductions of other artists’ works and photographs documenting the exhibition at the International Cultural Centre in Kraków.