Phuter o Jakha / Open Your Eyes

The screen Phuter o Jakha / Open Your Eyes by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas must be perceived in a wider context of her work, especially her multi-coloured paintings bearing Romany titles. Mirga-Tas reveals to her spectators episodes from the everyday of the Romany people: social meetings, household chores, and especially the tasks and chats of women. In her works, she produces portraits of her great-grandmother, grandmother and aunts, making them a pretext to depict an Romany customs and aesthetics. The composition of her works and the manner of presenting human figures bring to mind photographic frames. This effect results from her dialogue with photographs taken by her uncle Andrzej Mirga, a historian and documenter of Romany folklore.
 
The Romany, or Roma, are the largest and oldest ethnic minority in Europe. Once an itinerant, nomadic community, they found temporary abodes in every corner of the continent. Seeing their lifestyle, the non-Romany population answered by creating a negative stereotype of a Roma: the image of a tramp, a “wild Other”, a pauper and a thief, and nowadays – a person dependent on social benefits or wallowing in riches obtained from suspect sources. Mirga-Tas puts it straight, showing the Roma the way they see themselves. On the two-sided screen, she has shown her own aunt and the aunt’s neighbour. The latter figure is particularly arresting; smoking a cigarette, the seated woman covers her face with her palm in a very clear gesture of struggling with troubles or difficult emotions. In creating a new image of the Romany people, Mirga-Tas does not idealise their existence or seek a folkloristic idyll, even though the profusion of colour and texture in her works enchants the spectator’s eye.
 
The source of the signature decorativeness of Mirga-Tas’ works lies in the Romany fondness of colourful, glittering and sequinned clothes. In her patchwork screen, the artist has used various fabrics joined together with visible seams; some parts of the scenes have been painted in acrylics. Working with fabrics is customarily identified with women’s work; feminist scholars perceive an emancipative element in it. The questions of the Romany women’s social position, their everyday experience and their immersion in the culture that defines them, which are important to Mirga-Tas’ artistic explorations, are here interlinked with the issue of the status granted to the art of ethnic minorities. In the territory of mainstream art galleries, festivals and art biennales, themes related to the Romany community and its culture, which are central to Mirga-Tas’ creative output, function freely and her artistic activity constitutes a first step towards finding a new space for the art of the Romany people.