Malgorzata Mirga -Tas at Tate St Ives, 18 October 2024 to 5 January 2025
This Polish artist has been the first Roma to represent her country at the Venice Biennale 2022 and Tate St Ives are showing her first major exhibition in UK
Malgorzata Mirga -Taz was at the Tate when I went, looking lovely in a glittering gold blouse and layered black skirt worn with boots.
Unfortunately her well attended talk was inaudible. The acoustics at the gallery are terrible but I feel some experiment with mics and rehearsal could help. When I complained downstairs they told me they remembered me making a similar complaint after the last talk.
It seems such an unforgivable loss that we have the artist there but technical problems are preventing her words from reaching us.
Nowadays regrettably we are not given a little booklet but there is a lot of information online and on the wall and a video with snatches of gypsy music.
The book is not arriving to buy until the end of October.
It’s an impressive looking show of large figurative works made with brightly coloured fabrics, some with 3D relief or attached jewelry.
I enjoyed it and was pleased to learn more about the Roma and that the artist is trying to rehabilitate the image of gypsies and make more widely known their persecution by the nazis.
She has used documentary photos and references to pictures by past artists to make her own, with help from other women - whose names are not given.
I have questions- why does she leave all the background grey and flat for the faces and arms, which are drawn on top in black?
I was interested to read about nazi prisoners but surprised they are then depicted in one case as a violinist with no violin, in another a tram driver with no tram.
The soviet regime is mentioned but there is no hint of how Mirga-Tas sees that era.
Why no present day references to Roma life?
Can a gaily coloured image of a bear help in any way counter our disapproval of bears being trained in past times to dance?
Does recreating non - Roma stereotyped images of gypsies in any way change our view of them?
Do the large dark backgrounds work as the artist thinks to imply the images of people are emerging from a dark past?
It’s so difficult to make political points in imagery - so here the labels can become more poignant, informative and interesting than the pictures.
I found myself recalling how DH Lawrence wrote of gypsies, how they were depicted by Sven Berlin and Laura Knight, and how they fare in today’s society in UK.
Of course it’s Tate’s habit to generally feature one star artist so any comparisons or contemporary news stories are left to the audience to recall or research.
I’d like an area for these avenues to be referenced and discussed in the show - but at least as a member of one of Tate’s Look groups I will have the opportunity to do this later.
Will local Roma people be encouraged to attend and record their reactions?
The fact of the exhibition has roused my engagement with Roma issues but has the work rather than the labels said anything beyond to ask one to look at the nice pictures?
Could it have done ?
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