We visited the exhibitions at Tate St Ives celebrating the work of Outi Pieski and Beatriz Milhazes earlier this year - see my earlier blogposts:
Rob Donovan - Author: EXPLORING NEW WORLDS - OUTI PIESKI AT TATE ST IVES - AND REDEFINING BOUNDARIES
Rob Donovan - Author: BEATRIZ MILHAZES AT TATE ST IVES - A PORTUGUESE CELBRATION OF LIFE
Our friend, Stephen Vranch, took us round the latest show at Tate St Ives which is celebrating the art of Malgorzata Mirga-Tas on the morning of 1 November. It was a birthday gift for Louise. Stephen took the photographs that appear in the second part of this blog-post - they tell their own story.
 |
| Malgorzata Mirga-Tas |
In the first part below, I am indebted to the Guardian newspaper for the following insight into the artist and her Roma identity, as told by the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins:
"Her dazzling textile works caused a sensation at Europe’s two most important art events. Mirga-Tas talks about defying centuries of anti-Roma prejudice – and turning her mother’s old dresses into art.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is the sort of person who hugs a visitor even before she says hello. She welcomes me into her home in the village of Czarna Góra, at the foot of the Tatra mountains in southern Poland, with a high-wattage smile. The artist’s house is right next to her aunt’s and her mother’s. The modern buildings huddle together, facing each other protectively round a flower garden. Mirga-Tas loves being close to so
much of her family. “I go out of my house,” she says, “and drink coffee with my mother and my sister before I go to work.”This morning her husband is making the coffee, there is a plate groaning with cake on the table, and her two teenage boys, it being the school holidays, are slumbering upstairs. Mirga-Tas is a member of Poland’s Bergitka (mountain) Roma community, who have been settled here for centuries. It’s not the easiest thing in the world for her sons to negotiate their identity, she says. “When you decide to say to everyone you are Roma, you need to be strong and you need to work twice as hard.”
Delightful as the setting is, it’s not exactly an idyll. The houses are next to a river that regularly floods. Her grandfather, who bought the land, was barred from purchasing a better position, just one example of a seemingly endless history of everyday prejudice faced by the Roma people. Mirga-Tas points to the building opposite, where her aunt used to run a nursery. It was great, she says, since she would get the young Romany-speakers used to Polish before they arrived at primary school. “The transition can be difficult,” she says. Because of the language gap, “people think that Roma children are stupid”.
But the nursery got shut down by the authorities, she says. Many of the Romany community of Czarna Góra have found better prospects abroad. There’s a whole group of her family members in the UK, in Southend, on the Essex coast...
Her career is burgeoning. Mirga-Tas leapt into the consciousness of the international art world last year when her work was included in Europe’s two most important contemporary art events: Documenta, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale, for which she represented Poland. She covered its lofty pavilion’s walls, floor to ceiling, with 12 gloriously detailed, sensuous, tapestry-like works – not of woven cloth but rather collages created from stitched-together secondhand clothing and other textiles, depicting scenes of Romany life and portraits of people in her community.
The images were partly based on the frescoes in the Hall of the Months in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, northern Italy: 15th-century works of astonishing vitality that also inspired Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both. The whole effect was dazzling – and also welcoming, sensuous – an oasis. “Cloth tents, fabric interiors, woven rugs, quilts and cushions have been our homes, our futures, our survival,” wrote Romany scholar Ethel Brooks in the exhibition’s accompanying book. “We have always built our mobile palaces as means of existence.”
To make this “palace”, Mirga-Tas and her helpers, including her aunt, took over the huge foyer of an empty hotel in Zakopane. They worked every day till midnight, from November to March, in the latter stages under the sense of fear and dread brought about by Russia’s invasion of Poland’s eastern neighbour, Ukraine. The pavilion was a huge hit – and it was notable that she was the first Romany artist to represent a nation state at the biennale, despite the Roma being the largest ethnic minority in the EU.
A double-edged sword, perhaps: the pavilion’s co-curator, Wojciech Szymański, told me that although Mirga-Tas was the obvious choice for the role, and the selection panel’s unanimous choice, some noted that showing a Roma artist was oddly convenient for the populist, rightwing, Law and Justice party-led government. It could present a progressive image abroad by promoting a Romany artist at this most prominent of cultural events – while Law and Justice presided, simultaneously, over a political climate far from friendly to the nation’s Romany population.
These days, Mirga-Tas is back in her own studio: a unit on an industrial estate on Szaflary’s outskirts. Its unprepossessing exterior gives way to a joyous kaleidoscope of colour inside: the room is heaped with piles of brightly coloured used textiles and old clothing. Next to the window, her seamstress-assistants Małgorzata Brońska and Halina Bednarz are stationed at their sewing machines. Mirga-Tas buys some of the used fabric and clothes – but a lot of them are cast-offs from her and her family, a nod to a deep history of her community’s thrifty adaptiveness, but also in tune with an environmentally conscious impulse to reuse and recycle. “People give us things, too,” she says. “There’s a lady who regularly brings us stuff of her own, and from her friends.”
At the Polish pavilion, her textile portraits often incorporated fabrics from the subjects’ wardrobes – so that, as British Romany author Damian Le Bas put it, they were somehow more than represented, they were semi-present in a kind of “supervised reincarnation”.
This morning, Brońska and Bednarz have been machining some of the last patchwork elements of a vast portrait of Barbara Gawdzik-Brzozowska, a painter and illustrator who lived in Zakopane until her death in 2011. Mirga-Tas hadn’t heard of her until the commission, but she has always liked the work of her husband, the more celebrated Polish artist Tadeusz Brzozowski, and she is fond of their son. One of her mother’s old dresses has been repurposed as Gawdzik-Brzozowska’s blouse in the portrait, which is a proper tribute: “I never normally use items like this for people I don’t know.” The brown patterned waistcoat is made from curtains from Zakopane’s Imperial hotel.
Mirga-Tas studied sculpture in Kraków – and thinks of these works, perhaps surprisingly, more as sculpture than as painting rendered in fabric. In 2016, one of her sculptures came to wide attention in Poland for the wrong reasons: a carved wooden memorial she had made in 2011, honouring 29 Romany people murdered in 1942 near the village of Borzęcin Dolny, east of Kraków, was seriously vandalised, an act that led to widespread outrage and appeals to the president for funding to restore it, which he did.
This was close to the bone for Mirga-Tas: one of her great-grandfathers was murdered in the Porajmos (“the devouring”, the Romany word for the Holocaust), along with 50% to 75% of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe. That same year, she also made a piece of work that set her on her current path. Wesiune Thana (Place in the Woods) was an installation among the Romany houses in an open-air museum of rural culture at the Sądecki Ethnographic Park in Nowy Sącz, south-east of Kraków.
Between the little wooden buildings among the trees were structures, including a forge, that had been removed from her village, ones she remembered from her childhood. She draped them in bright, patchwork textiles – playing with the expectations of visitors for “colourful”, “ethnic” Gypsy flavours, as well as joyfully reclaiming and reviving the little houses. It was a pointed intervention into a long and fraught relationship between the Roma people and the discipline of ethnography. “We can speak in our own voice, but even now, the ‘expert’ voice on the Roma is seen as more important than the Roma voice itself,” she says. And yet Mirga-Tas, through the vigorous clarity of her art, is a force for change. She is speaking loud and clear in her own voice – and with authority."
Such a glorious image, a real person brought to life through textiles.
Imagine as you will...
 |
| Roma on the road - there is joy in this movement |
 |
| Story-telling which brings the Roma community to life rather than remaining as an unknown object of prejudice and scapegoating |
 |
| A few pieces of fabric - and the mood is captured above. And the skill is also worked out on screens. |
No comments:
Post a Comment