Małgorzata Mirga-Tas b. 1978

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is a Polish-Romani visual artist, sculptor, painter, educator and activist. Born in 1978, she lives and works in Czarna Góra, a Romani village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, where she also works as an educator and activist. Małgorzata Mirga- Tas combines various techniques to talk about the convoluted Roma and Roma-Polish identity and show the daily life of her community. Mirga-Tas’s work explores themes around history of the Romani people and transcultural and transnational experience of being a Roma. Mirga-Tas' strategy is a kind of insider ethnography that in its own way continues and responds to the work of her uncle Andrzej Mirga, an ethnographer who studied the Romani community from within.This critical tension between the objectification and lived experience of Roma culture is a recurring motif for Mirga-Tas. Drawing on history, anthropology and art history, Mirga-Tas deploys the strategies of reappropriation and upcycling to lay bare the mechanisms that are at the root of much popular thinking about the Roma in Poland and beyond. By reclaiming the voice of her community, Mirga-Tas speaks to the shifting social landscape of Europe, both past and present.