Cut from Her Family’s Cloth: The Textiles of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Her aunts’ curtains, her neighbours’ tablecloths, her family’s worn-out coats: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas builds portraits out of fabric that has already lived a life. In four years, those portraits have taken her from a Roma settlement in the Tatras to Venice, Kassel, London and Bregenz – and made her one of the most significant voices in contemporary textile art.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, mounted at London’s Barbican in 2024 and subsequently at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam – one of the most important and most ambitious cross-generational surveys of textile as a medium in modern and contemporary art in recent years – brought together over 40 artists from around the world. Among works by Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois were pieces by two artists from Poland: Magdalena Abakanowicz and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
That curatorial decision – which for the first of the two merely reaffirmed a significance long established within global narratives of modern art history – was an emphatic confirmation of the second artist’s place in the contemporary international art world and its circuits. A place Mirga-Tas had occupied for good only two years earlier, in 2022, when her textiles appeared in two major exhibitions: the 59th Venice Art Biennale and documenta 15 in Kassel, winning her instant recognition, accompanied by the acclaim of general audiences and professionals alike.
Three shows, three framings
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World, Polish Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2022, photo: Daniel Rumiancew / courtesy of Zachęta — National Gallery of Art
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However, the way the London show positioned this Polish-Roma artist’s textile art, and the way it framed the medium of cloth within her practice, differed from both earlier propositions. The presentation of Mirga-Tas’s work at the Polish Pavilion in Venice, under the title Re-enchanting the World, was after all a solo exhibition. In Kassel, meanwhile, her work formed part of the group show One Day We Shall Celebrate Again, set alongside that of other transnational artists who, like her, were all Roma. So while the Venice exhibition foregrounded Roma presence, underlining the breakthrough represented by the first Roma artist in the Biennale’s history, and the Kassel presentation stressed the visibility of an entire group of Roma artists within the field of contemporary art, the London show – by directing attention to the medium of cloth itself – problematised the materiality of Mirga-Tas’s art.
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, from the series Out of Egypt, 2021, patchwork, Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, photo: Maciej Zaniewski
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The curators of Unravel concentrated in particular on one aspect of a practice that repeatedly makes use of clothing, materials and textiles worn, used and owned by members of the artist’s family and by people close to her. Fragments of garments that have been in intimate contact with bodies, along with tablecloths, rugs, net curtains and drapes taken from people’s homes – used, touched, looked at by their owners – become, in the portraits Mirga-Tas builds from them, a literal material carrier saturated with personal narrative, ideally suited to conveying complex lived and historical experience. Placing her work in the section titled Fabric of Everyday Life, alongside artists exploiting the potential held in precisely this kind of cloth – among them Loretta Pettway, Sheila Hicks and Sanford Biggers – was therefore a well-founded and readily comprehensible choice. Which is not to say that the textile on display, from the series Out of Egypt (2021), could not have sat in any of the other sections, illustrating other concerns central to this art form and articulated by the curators: the politics of the medium, its historical gendering, racialisation and class inscription, along with its subversiveness and the emancipatory potential held within cloth. At the same time, the work shown makes a good starting point for examining a medium that, with varying intensity, came gradually to occupy more and more space in Mirga-Tas’s practice.
Answering back to Jacques Callot
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, 'Wesiune thana', 2016, reverse side, photo: Marcin Tas, courtesy of the artist
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Out of Egypt, a series of monumental textiles made for the artist’s solo exhibition at Arsenał Gallery in Białystok in 2021 and presented to international audiences a year later at documenta 15 in Kassel, certainly occupies a prominent place in her body of work. These were the first pieces she decided not to stretch over a frame – as she had done until then, for instance in the many textile screens she had been making since 2016 and first showed in 2017 at the group exhibition Kali Berga at the Kai Dikhas gallery in Berlin – giving them a looser and, one is tempted to say, ’more textile’ character.
Naturally, the question of reuse – or a kind of upcycling – of scraps of clothing and fabric retrieved from the wardrobes and homes of the artist’s family, which Unravel underlined, was already significant while she was working on the cycle. But equally important here was the political and subversive aspect of reworking one medium into another: historical black-and-white prints belonging to European high art transposed into contemporary, multicoloured textile collages resembling fine, old and precious tapestries.
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Otwarcie wystawy z wielkoformatową pracą "Saworo, saworo, saworo" Małgorzaty Mirgi-Tas w Królewskim Muzeum Sztuki i Historii w Brukseli, fot. Kuba Celej/IAM
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In this way, the artist problematised the European convention – established as early as the turn of the 16th century – for depicting Roma people by non-Roma, a convention that also lies behind four etchings widely regarded as masterpieces of European printmaking: Les Bohémiens / La Vie des Égyptiens (The Gypsies / The Life of the Egyptians, c. 1621) by the Lorraine artist Jacques Callot. It was these that became the cycle’s point of departure. Callot, like many Europeans of his era, identified the Roma homeland with Egypt and drew on the full inventory of anti-Roma stereotypes. His prints show homeless nomads in cloaks and feathered hats, often armed, hauling their possessions on carts, men playing cards, children sitting by a fire, bandits looting village buildings. The etchings were accompanied by rhyming inscriptions in French that made their hostility towards Roma people explicit.
The striking and at the same time spectacular effect Mirga-Tas achieved in Out of Egypt – through scale, and through the combination of different textile materials, weaves, textures, weights and degrees of sheen – has become a permanent part of her repertoire, and textiles harnessing the emancipatory potential of reappropriating Roma imagery have since become an important strand of her work. A perfect example is Sawore, Sawore, Sawore (2025), commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and shown at the Art & History Museum in Brussels as part of Poland’s presidency of the EU Council.
Important as it is, the Out of Egypt cycle was not the artist’s first reach for cloth. She had been incorporating small fragments of clothing and scraps of material into her acrylic paintings on canvas since at least 2013, creating a kind of painting-textile collage: figures rendered partly in paint wore ’real’ garments cut from fabric and glued to the surface of the canvas, and ’real’ clothes hung from painted washing lines. This collage quality is clearly visible in Poker (2013) and The Visitation (2014), both shown and awarded at the 42nd Bielska Jesień Painting Biennial in 2015, as well as in the frequently reproduced and exhibited O Fotografis (2015).
When cloth became architecture
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, 'O fotografis', 2015, photo: Marcin Tas, private collection
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Cloth was also present in the series of double-sided, lightweight textile screens mentioned above, made from 2016 onwards on coloured wooden frames filled with fabric stretched over battens. I remember well the first, prototype object of this kind, which on account of its weight had to be unfolded by at least two people. The screen in question, Wesiune Thana, was made of heavy panels sheathed in fabric – it had more in common with architecture and a load-bearing wall than with a portable partition provisionally and contingently dividing up space. And indeed its relationship to architecture was no accident.
In that same year, 2016, the artist made another work under the same title, shown at the group exhibition pany chłopy chłopy pany held at the Sądecki Ethnographic Park in Nowy Sącz and devoted to the visions of the rural past produced by museum practice and ethnographic discourse. It was then that Mirga-Tas first used the medium of textile in relation to architecture, covering with works in cloth – figurative but non-narrative, and destined to recur many times in her work – the roofs of Roma houses relocated to the open-air museum, along with a Roma forge that had once belonged to her grandfather’s brother. This outdoor textile installation was completed with ropes plaited from torn fabric by Roma women from the artist’s home settlement in Czarna Góra, intended to link the Roma buildings with the forest around them.
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Wesiune thana, 2016, Sądecki Ethnographic Park in Nowy Sącz, photo: Marcin Tas, courtesy of the artist
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It was from the textiles covering one of the roofs at the Nowy Sącz open-air museum that the heavy, architectural prototype screen was made once the exhibition had closed. In this sense, the Nowy Sącz installation became the starting point both for the series of screens and for the artist’s other textile-architectural works – including the Venice exhibition-installation Re-enchanting the World, part of which was, after all, a large-format textile mounted on the façade of the Polish Pavilion.
A forge inside a masterpiece
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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, 'Tele Ćerhenia Jekh Jag', 2025, Kunsthaus Bregenz, exhibition view, photo: Daniel Rumiancew, courtesy of the artist
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Nor can one fail to mention here the reconstruction of the Czarna Góra forge, assembled from pictures made of cloth, which formed the heart of the artist’s solo exhibition Tełe Ćerhenia Jekh Jag (Under the Starry Heavens a Fire Burns) at Kunsthaus Bregenz in the summer of 2025. Built for the occasion, Mirga-Tas’s textile building – or afterimage of one – placed inside the iconic, monumental glass-and-concrete masterpiece that is the Kunsthaus, looked spectacular indeed: like its negation, a counter-architecture. Irony deliberately set against epiphany.
So what the Barbican made visible was not simply a subject but a method. Mirga-Tas’s cloth carries the histories of the bodies it has touched, and it carries them into the institutions – the pavilion, the biennial, the kunsthaus – that spent four centuries picturing those bodies from outside.
Originally written in Polish, Jan 2026, translated by AZ, July 2026