Rewriting Roma history one stitch at a time: Contemporary Polish textile resonates next to Renaissance Brussels tapestries

Deep within the vast halls of Brussels’ Art & History Museum, a shiny new textile work dazzles with intimate and joyful scenes of Romani women and children.

The contemporary fabric collage by internationally-renowned Polish-Romani artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas boasts an illustrious setting amid masterpiece 16th-century tapestries woven in Brussels.

Temporarily replacing one of these biblical wall hangings depicting the story of Jacob, the new work, entitled Sawore, Sawore, Sawore  (Everything, everything, everything), is a final element of the EU Council Polish Presidency cultural programme.

As one of Poland’ foremost contemporary artists, Mirga-Tas has forged a singular career challenging stereotypical representations of Roma people. If her latest vibrant 3D textile work was a testing commission, it also highlighted a little-known aspect of the important tapestry series from the studio of Brussels weaver Willem de Kempeneer.

A research trip to the Cinquantenaire Park museum last autumn resulted in an unexpected revelation for Mirga-Tas and her curator Wojciech Szymański. Many of the models for the tapestry series were Romani women and children (pictured above), their ethnicity evident in their turban-style headdresses and distinctive cloaks, explains Szymanski.

For the artist, these secondary undocumented characters served as inspiration for her composition, creating an even more pertinent dialogue with the original works. Replicating these historic figures, she places them alongside members of her own family and community, including two self-portraits of herself, for a contemporary re-telling of the narrative.

In addition to providing a critical perspective on migration policies and minority discrimination, Mirga-Tas’s visual storytelling is driven by a feminist viewpoint. For Olga Brzezińska, the deputy director of Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz Institute that co-organised the presidency programme, the artist’s composition is revolutionary for “giving a voice to those whose stories have so often been told by others”.

Brzezińska references the artist’s characteristic patchwork style that elevates women’s domestic skills such as sewing, mending and darning. “I’m drawn to the symbolism of stitching, of mending relationships with a minority community or patching the gaps on our collective narrative of female experience,” she says.

The meaning of this vivid work is beautifully captured by the artist’s own words, according to Brzezińska: “My feminism does not shout, but tells stories”.

Mirga-Tas (pictured above, right) is keen to point out that all of the materials she employs in her meticulously detailed and plush collages are upcycled from donations by family and community or sourced from second-hand shops. She calls them “travelling textile stories” as the fabrics “are part of a global history of how textiles are made in Asia and then shipped elsewhere.”

She was initially sceptical about creating such a dialogue with the rare tapestries. The monumental size of the work – her largest ever – also presented a logistical challenge for Mirga-Tas’ small studio in southern Poland. “It covered the whole floor and I couldn’t get a picture of the whole composition, which was a little stressful,” she admits.

It was only when the work was finally hung in the museum that the artist could fully appreciate the dynamic design. “I was worried that it needed more people in it, but now I think it’s perfect.”

Szymański was also a little unsure of the undertaking, noting the ambiguity of the museum with its great collections but also colonial history. “But I think it’s good to do something here that recognises the Roma people,” he says.

As well as replicating the size of the Jacob tapestry series and the intricate folds of the figures’ robes, the contemporary work features a border with a striking motif filled with animals rather than the floral vegetation preferred during the Renaissance. Like the familial groupings in the composition, it reflects the personal preferences of the artist. She includes horses because she simply likes them and bears because they are native to the mountainous region she calls home.

A similar upper and central panel in red and gold bears a sentence from the poem Tears of Blood by the classic Polish-Romanian poet Papusza, which recounts the Roma Holocaust. It paraphrases a quotation about sisters surviving the genocide and then telling a story of sawary (everything).

If the title is ambiguous with its reference to a traumatic past, it also communicates the joy for life that typifies the Roma people, insists Mirga-Tas. It is precisely this depiction of joyfulness that contradicts the narrative all too often applied to Europe’s largest ethnic minority.

Re-appropriating historical artworks is characteristic of Mirga-Tas’ rich body of work, which has featured at two of Europe’s most important contemporary art events, Documenta and the Venice Biennale.

Several of her vivid collages are currently on display in the group show Familiar Strangers at Bozar, which is also part of Poland’s cultural programme.

Malgorzata Mirga-Tas: Sawore, sawore, sawore
Until 30 June
Art & History Museum
Cinquantenaire Park 10
Brussels

Photos: ©Be Culture; Mirga-Tas ©Jakub Celej-IAM; Małgorzata Mirga-Tas w pracowni