A work from the WGM collection on display at Zachęta Gallery

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Roma visual artist, painter, sculptor, educator and activist. She is a graduate of Antoni Kenar State High School of Art Techniques in Zakopane. In 2004 she received a diploma at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She lives and creates in Czarna Góra, where she grew up in the Roma community. She is involved in social projects that counteract exclusion, racial discrimination and xenophobia. She is the founder of the Romani Art movement and the originator of the international artist residency program “Jaw Dikh!”. In 2020 she received the Polityka Passport in the “Visual Arts” category. Her most important works include: “Out of Egypt”, “Place in the Woods” and “29. Ceroplastic exercises”, all very well received by art critics.

In 2022 Małgorzata Mirga-Tas presented a large-format installation “Re-enchanting the World” in the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The fabric called “May” is one of the 12 parts of this monumental cycle. It presents portraits of Cejla Stojka – an activist, painter and Roma singer who survived Auschwitz, and Krystyna Gil – a survivor of the massacre of Roma from Szczurowa. The work encourages reflection on the possibility of working through the trauma of the Holocaust in art and the issue of post-memory in the Second and Third Generation of Survivors.