The Personal is Political: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas on Roma Art

malgorzata_mirga-tas_w_pracowni_12_z_29.jpg, default, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in her studio, 2025, photo: Jakub Celej/AMI, The Personal is Political: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas on Roma Art

#photography & visual arts

Roma-Polish artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas reclaims the image of her community through vibrant, tactile works that blend activism, memory and family stories. In this conversation, she reflects on art as a decolonizing practice – giving voice to Roma history, challenging stereotypes, and weaving new narratives of visibility and belonging.

It hasn’t been the first time for Małgorzata Mirga-Tas's works to showcase the Polish art scene on the wide European waters. The artist, who represented Poland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, has shown her works in the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels in the context of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council, as well as in group exhibitions – in the Brussels Bozar centre and the Moldovan National Museum of Art. With the critic and art curator Marta Czyż the artist talks about representation, regaining the voice of the Roma and translating it into the language of the present.

Marta Czyż: Do you feel that your identity – as a Roma, a woman, an artist – is more visible today, or is it still subject to certain simplifications or external expectations?

Małgorzata Mirga–Tas: My identity is complex, because I am Romani, Polish, a woman, a mother and an artist. Of course, I feel that I have been more visible recently and this is due to invitations to numerous exhibitions, mainly in international institutions. I did not feel this way when I exhibited in Poland, where for many years I was completely invisible. My career and thus visibility were certainly helped by 'Paszporty Polityki' [a prestigious cultural award granted by Polityka magazine, translator’s note] and the Polish Pavilion in Venice. What I have always cared about most in my artistic practice is the possibility of telling stories about my identity, culture and heritage. I would like to believe that thanks to my work, the Roma topic is becoming more familiar and better understood by majority societies. It is also a form of activism, education through art, which I have carried out for many years working for the Roma community.

MC: You create the current canon by using means of expression of contemporary art in your artistic practice, thus breaking a certain stereotype. You are part of the trend of telling about Roma art by Roma people in their own language. This was visible, among others, in one of the exhibitions during the last documenta.

MMT: I think that documenta showed that artists from minority communities such as Roma can and should speak for themselves. However, for years we were on the margins, constantly pushed into ethnic boxes. I think that the Polish Pavilion influenced the change in the perception of identity art, Roma art and art telling Roma stories, which changed the perspective of artists of Roma origin. Suddenly it turned out that exhibitions of Roma artists in important institutions, at biennials are possible and arouse great interest and open up space for discussion.

MC: Now we are at an important moment of integration of this art.

MMT: I am very happy when I hear that more and more Roma artists present their works and their point of view in large art institutions, such as Robert Gabris, Selma Selman, Luna De Rosa, Milka Rigova and many other artists of Roma origin. I was delighted when my friend Delaine Les Bas was nominated for the Turner Prize. I think that this nomination was long overdue. She is an extraordinary artist who has a very coherent and consistently developed art concept. Her works were presented at the Venice Biennale in the Roma Pavilion. I regret that she did not win the Turner, but the nomination itself means a lot to us Roma artists. Presently, we can observe a great interest in artists from various ethnic minorities, which also says a lot about what is currently happening in Europe and the world. This is creating a space to discuss certain historical situations and shed light from the perspective of an artist representing a given ethnic group.

MC: It is not only political correctness, but also an attempt to fix things that can no longer be fixed. However, we can make certain gestures that can change something in our consciousness. Thinking about the history of England, about colonialism, we will not turn back time, but such gestures, distinctions are an attempt at reparation. However, Roma art is still perceived quite stereotypically.

MMT: We have the right to talk about ourselves and our culture. When creating their works, Roma artists base their work on sensitivity, experience and knowledge of their culture. Unfortunately, I have a bit of a problem with non–Roma artists who try to step into ethnographic shoes and talk about Roma based on their own image of us. Their works tend to reduce us Roma to the role of ethnographic exhibits, often presenting us in a distorting mirror, repeating all those negative calques about us that we persistently try to fight. Such artistic and curatorial stumbles can be seen even at large artistic events with an international reach.

MC: How does your art negotiate the place of Roma people in art history? Is it a critical gesture towards the canon or its creative expansion?

MMT: It is above all a critical gesture, revitalizing towards the presentation of the image of Roma people up to the 20th century from the perspective of non–Roma artists. At the exhibition Travelling images curated by Wojciech Szymański and Natalia Żak at the Małopolska Cultural Center in Krakow, there was an entire iconographic part that showed how non–Roma artists up to the 20th century presented Roma images. It was only in the 20th century, i.e. relatively recently, that Roma artists regained their voice and were able to speak on their own behalf. It is therefore a critical voice, because the art created so far by non-Roma people, which enjoyed recognition, was and is contrary to our perspective. That is why Roma artists are creating a new image of our historical and present experience. This is actually what my work is based on, which is a manifesto and a decolonizing practice.

Not so long ago in Oslo I talked about representations of Roma based on Jacques Callot's graphics and wandering Roma. Almost the same images appear, for example, in graphics from the 18th or 19th century: camps, cows, horses, Roma families, etc. One has the impression that it is a copy of one and the same work. Everyone thinks that Roma are primarily a nation leading an itinerant, nomadic lifestyle. Being a nomad is a choice, but what was actually the case was that they were fleeing from violence, slavery, wars and persecution. It was never their choice. They moved from place to place, looking for a better and safer space to live. Do you know that Roma were hunted in many European countries? There were various decrees prohibiting 'Gypsies' from staying in the territory of a given country. That is why they would flee. Because they did not fit into a specific kind.

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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in her studio, 2025, photo: Jakub Celej/AMI

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MC: How do you choose the heroines and heroes of your works? Are you guided by emotional closeness, the political significance of their story, or something else? Often, the heroes and heroines of your works are people from your closest circle.

MMT: When I decide to portray a person, I am guided by many factors, but the common feature is their story. It does not matter to me whether it is a person with public visibility or unknown to anyone. What is important is that these are people who play an important role in the Roma community.

Recently, while in Oslo, I met a wonderful activist Natalia and I know that I will definitely present her in my next work. I want to talk about people who make a difference, who work for their community and teach young people. My heroes and heroines are people who inspire me. Ones like Natalia, who is not widely known, but ensures that our culture and identity are preserved. Our work is also done for the next generations, who, I hope, will continue it. My beloved and most important heroines and favorite models are my mother and sister. The women from my family are particularly important to me.

MC: Your works are full of material traces of the past – clothes, fabrics, textures. Does this sensual contact with an object have a dimension of a ritual or a story about the body and memory for you?

MMT: The clothes I use in my works are not only about texture, colour or other artistic values, but equally important, or maybe even more important, is who wore them. Fabrics once worn by their owner are a kind of a carrier of energy or memories related to a given person. The first clothes I used to produce my works came mainly from my family and closest ones, often they were my own things. Each of them carried some memory. When I did workshops with children and young people, I asked them to bring clothes from their grandparents, aunts, etc. This was a very important point of reference. When you have clothes from your ancestors and you sew a picture that tells their story, you will always do it with tenderness, sensitivity and remembrance of them.

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A fragment of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas's work, 2025, photo: Jakub Celej/AMI

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MC: Does participating in exhibitions related to the Polish presidency of the EU carry any tensions? For example, between the politics of representation and the politics of the state?

MMT: The topic taken up by Joanna Warsza in the exhibition Familiar Strangers at Bozar in Brussels seemed very interesting to me because as a Pole, a European, a woman of Roma origin, I am part of the society in which I live, and my experience and what I do build our common culture. We are not 'someone else' or someone from nowhere in the place where we live.

With the exhibition at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels, it so happened that Wojciech Szymański, the curator, first went there without me. I remember that he called me from there and told me that on the 17th–century fabrics that hang there, there is the biblical story of Jacob, which includes people of Roma origin. From numerous studies, we know how the Roma community was presented, wandering through many countries, we know how they dressed, etc. And suddenly you see this story of Jacob and you realize that the artist Bernard van Orley, who portrays Dutch residents observed on the street, is also portraying Roma people seen there, who are hard not to notice, because they stand out visually against the Dutch. This was an impulse for me to clash the present with the past, to create a parallel, a connection between that time and ours. To prove that these supposedly unknown newcomers have always been part of Europe. In the foreground are women and people from my community and my family, in the background – Roma figures from the past. I connected everyone with one another on this fabric, showing that we are a transnational minority, but also part of Europe. As a Roma-Polish woman, I could not help but take part in this exhibition.

Looking at these amazing fabrics, you learn to look at them with a critical eye, reading this history anew, changing it a little, expanding it, translating it into contemporary language, to show that it does not always have to be this way and that it does not mean that we have to always show ourselves in the same way. I show myself and my surroundings in these works the way I want, that is, the way we look every day. The Brussels tapestries are truly beautiful, they have fantastic colours, and the fact that we are visible at all means a lot to me. It is as if you suddenly found yourself there, your community, your history, your heritage. Through such representation, we also see that this was not an invisible or marginalised or deliberately hidden community. Maybe this particular artist, Bernard van Orley, was simply aware that this community had experienced a lot of suffering and violence just because its members looked and behaved differently (had different customs?).

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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas in her studio, 2025, photo: Jakub Celej/AMI

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MC: The last exhibition you took part in during the cultural programme accompanying the Polish EU Presidency was 'Lushness. Women's Art in the 21st Century' in Chisinau, curated by Dorota Monkiewicz.

MMT: I showed two paintings there: one where my neighbor, aunt, her sister and husband are playing poker and another one where my uncle Andrzej visits his uncle, also Andrzej, his father's brother in Szaflary and is titled Visitation. Both of these paintings were painted based on photographs by my uncle Andrzej Mirga, one of the first Roma to graduate from university, the first Roma ethnographer in Poland. He took these photographs in the 80s and 90s, when he was an assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University. These beautiful photographs taken by a Roma are a portrait of the community he comes from, often showing his family and neighbors. My uncle is reluctant to share these photos, but of course he lets me use them. My works are often based on family archives, private photos, because they are a direct reference to our real life and culture, where we can finally talk about ourselves and represent ourselves.

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar, originally published in July 2025.

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