Stories We Become

A Material Called Life. On the Work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
 
Joanna Warsza
 
 
‘You don't always need to present yourself as a Romani artist’, an organiser of a large exhibition in Poland once remarked to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Indeed, she does not need to but expressly chooses to. Why omit this fact if her artworks, sensibilities, artistic and activist practices are all grounded in the Polish Romani culture and refer especially to Romani women? Her art is socially and politically entangled – and, most importantly, autonomously created within a community that is otherwise often tokenised and stigmatised. It is, paraphrasing Donna Haraway and her concept of situated knowledge, a Roma-situated art. This apparently innocent curatorial comment on Mirga-Tas’ work, a piece of ‘good advice’ on how to wash away her ethnic colouring and avoid any associations with ethnographic museums, obviously begs a plethora of important questions relevant to our times: Who has the right to speak for whom? How can the mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination be dismantled? How do power relations relate to representation? What is the place of native art within the canon of contemporary art? What does minority feminism in the traditional community look like? Can there be a reciprocal acculturation, and, if so, how can the majority learn from the minority? Finally, can working on identity, especially one rooted in the experience of injustice, be an affirmative and emancipatory strategy rather than a reductionist, isolating one? If so, how?
 
Mirga-Tas was born in Zakopane and graduated from the sculpture department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She lives in a Roma settlement in Czarna Góra, in the Carpathian Foothills, where she also works as an educator and activist. She is married and has two sons. She is Romani, Polish and European. Her vibrant patchworks with rich ornaments and her sculptures, screens, small altars and pictorial collages often depict scenes from everyday life in Roma settlements. They mainly portray women and their relationships, alliances, and joint activities; they also show children and animals, and, less often, men. Mirga-Tas’ paintings are created from fragments of different fabrics by, as she calls it: ‘throwing the material into the painting’. Many of the fabrics sewn onto her paintings to create collages were taken directly from the wardrobes of the people depicted, who are often part of her intimate circle. They consist of bits of skirts, scarves or shirts sewn onto curtains, drapes, bedclothes or rags. ‘Shall I sell this dress, give it to someone, or do you want it for a painting?’, her mother would often ask. The material employed literally carries history. Knowing who has worn a given article and under what circumstances is a matter of no small importance: bearing the traces of life and use, the appropriated materials are infused with energy and gain a new artistic existence. The curtains become the underlying architecture of the works and, at the same time, the visual basis for the creation of feminist narratives about ‘bright people and their characters’.

In recent years, Mirga-Tas has created many works about important women in her life, building an affective archive of the Romani herstory. This feminine genealogy consists, for example, of small altars dedicated to four of her relatives who inspired her in the pursuit of change: her great-grandmother Anna, her grandmother Józefina and her aunts Helena and Ibrona. The painting Sisters presents four women. The first is hanging a sweatshirt displaying a card-playing motif upon a line to dry. The second woman is braiding, with rapt attention, what seems like an endless rope, and the third one is appraising a patchwork cloth – upon which the fourth woman is sewing. The fabric becomes a curtain, a tapestry or some laundry, something like a flying carpet or perhaps a screen. It all merges into a communally shared camouflage akin to a protective coat of sorts. In curator Maria Lind’s Instagram project ‘52proposalsforthe20s’, one can also behold new collage-portraits of women from the artworld that have inspired Mirga-Tas: Delaine Le Bas, artist and creator of the mobile Roma embassy; Timea Junghaus, curator and initiator of the first Roma pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale; Teresa Mirga, poet and singer, and Adela Głowacka, activist and leader of the Romano Waśt Association and caretaker of the Radom Jewish cemetery.
 
In Russia and Scandinavia, early women’s organizations had their genesis in associations like weaving workshops or sewing clubs, which allowed women to engage in politics and to campaign by taking part in certain ‘emancipatory’ practices under the guise of their involvement in traditionally accepted ‘feminine activities’. With Mirga-Tas, the impulse toward change, education and fighting stigmatisation is perhaps comparable yet different. Instead of achieving social gains through self-denial, what is engendered here springs from the affirmation of the self – from a grounded desire to practice these ‘feminine activities’, so as to emphasise and even perform one’s own identity. This is not achieved by conforming to the expectations of any appraising voice from outside but rather by constructing new, positive models of a transnational community that references specific ornaments, colours and history.
 
In their formal eclecticism, Mirga-Tas’ artworks also evoke the idea of femmage, a concept coined in the late 1970s by Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, both American artists associated with the second wave of feminism. Femmage was born from various driving forces and is most famously associated with slogans such as ‘the personal is political’, and with efforts made to reclaim the authorship of works by women that, over the course of centuries, had consistently been falsely attributed to men. It is likewise associated with appeals – now still strikingly contemporary – for the blurring of borders and asymmetries between so-called native and professional art. The femmage combines collage, assemblage, photomontage and other similar techniques, both in traditional communities and in contemporary art. Mirga-Tas’ femmage also has an ecological dimension, introducing fabrics and materials that would otherwise end as waste back into circulation: ‘Even during my studies, I was running all over Krakow searching for wasted paper and boxes’. Indeed, the artist's sculptures are made primarily of cardboard and wax.
 
Just as the activist movements of #sayhername and #saytheirnames seek to raise awareness around the Black victims of police brutality in the United States by placing the emphasis on telling the stories of specific people rather than treating them as statistics, so does Mirga-Tas present names and affirm a circle of women who are important, both to herself and to her community; she builds up models that juxtapose tradition, ornamentation, patchworks and small altars with emancipatory politics. Mirga-Tas calls herself a feminist and practises minority feminism, although, as she told me, ‘many women around her view this term with suspicion’. Roma feminism – as according to researcher Ethel C. Brooks – does not aim at cutting women off from their backgrounds or cultural baggage but instead works within a specific context in various ways. At the local and private levels, this often means changing the perceptions or behaviours of men at home. On a structural level, it means fighting against nationalism, confronting dysfunctional social behaviours, and combating racism and preconceptions stemming from a mixture of fantasy and disdain.
 
The optimism of Mirga-Tas’ work comes from her way of being a realist who responds to the mechanisms of both exclusion and self-exclusion with sisterhood and internationalism. The language she employs to overthrow antiziganist stereotypes reflects a determination to affirm and build positive paradigms through art, which is the inverse of the pornography of poverty proffered in the media and the fetish for exhibiting impoverished Roma settlements. Feminism in Mirga-Tas’ works and activism stems from a subjective, emancipatory story, wherein autonomy, the recording of women’s genealogies, the practice of sisterhood, as well as a conscious rooting in Romani identity and culture are first and foremost embodied ideas, and only later theoretical concepts. Similar strategies were pursued by, among others, Katarina Taikon, who, sometimes referred to as the Martin Luther King Jr. of Sweden, was an activist, actress and writer, and the author of a series of children’s books about the little Roma girl Katitzi that became nearly as popular as Pippi Longstocking.
 
The Romani people are Europe’s largest and oldest ethnic minority with around 30,000 people living in Poland, without any state-forming desires or territorial claims. Anti-territoriality, but also, for example, mobility, post-nationalism, the organisation of public gatherings as well as an oneiric architecture: these are just some of the aspects of a culture from which one can draw inspiration for the construction of new democratic models. That being the case, any normative view would nonetheless need to undergo the same kind of transformation enacted in Marga-Tas’ art.
 
I had the opportunity to encounter Mirga-Tas’ works for the first time at the Art Encounters Biennale in Timisoara. The Romanian region of Banat, which was the political and cultural context in which the exhibition took place, and the still vivid concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’ and its ethnic and cultural diversity encouraged me to see it as an affirmative opposition to the homogeneity and national rhetoric prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe.
 
Personally, I do not like to describe myself as a Polish curator; if necessary, I would rather say I am a curator who comes from Poland, a country that, fortunately, is becoming increasingly inhabited by nationalities that do not necessarily identify themselves as Polish. However, I felt pride in seeing the work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in Romania, featured as that of a Romani and Polish artist. For her, these two adjectives belong to processing the material of intercultural identity.