You can’t miss the Polish pavilion. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has covered the entire facade with hand-stitched fabric panels two stories high.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World, exhibition view, Polish Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World, exhibition view, Polish Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew.
For the first time in the over-120-year history of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, a Roma artist is representing a national pavilion. The project Re-enchanting the World by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, prepared specifically for the Polish Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022, is an attempt to find the place of the Roma community in European art history. The exhibition proposed by curators Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza was the winner of a competition organised by Zachęta — National Gallery of Art.
Authors of exhibition: Wojciech Szymański, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Joanna Warsza. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew.
The title is inspired by Silvia Federici’s book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018). Its author posits recovering the idea of community and rebuilding relationships with others, including non-human actors: animals, plants, water or mountains. This non-violent process, in which women play an important role, reverses the world’s current dire fate, shaking off the evil spell that has been cast upon it.— says Wojciech Szymański & Joanna Warsza.
Preparations for the exhibition Re-enchanting the World in the studio of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Zakopane, 2021. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew
Re-enchanting the World is Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s manifesto on Roma identity and art, drawing inspiration from the astrological frescos of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. You are about to enter a ‘picture palace’, an installation of twelve large-format textiles, corresponding to the months of the calendar, which expands the history of art with representations of the culture of the Roma, the largest European minority.
Hall of the Months, Museo Schifanoia, Ferrara, courtesy Musei di Arte Antica di Ferrara. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Roma artist and activist. In her works, sculptures, paintings, spatial objects and large-format textiles, she addresses anti-Romani stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities. She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (2004). She participated in several dozen individual and group exhibitions, including the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), the Art Encounters Biennial in Timişoara (2019, 2021), 3rd Autostrada Biennale in Prizren (2021), while her works were displayed at the Moravian Gallery in Brno (2017), the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (2020), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2020), or Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne (2021), among others. She lives and works in Czarna Góra, Poland.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Photo: Ina Lekiewicz
The exhibition Re-enchanting the World by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is accompanied by a catalogue in Polish and English and designed by Agata Biskup. The publication edited by Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza, in addition to the curators’ texts, includes essays by specially invited writers (Ali Smith, Damian Le Bas, scholar Ethel Brooks), and poems by Teresa Mirga and Jan Mirga. The co-publisher of the publication is Archive Books and European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). The catalogue as a pdf version can be dowloaded for free from the website.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World (March), 2022, textile installation (fragment), 462 x 387 cm. Photo: Daniel Rumiancew.
Source: Press release https://labiennale.art.pl/
