ABAGo
A serious, interesting, radical intellectual visual culture about Europe
The history of the Roma and Sinti is often one of marginalization, exclusion, distortion and persecution in Poland and Europe.
The 59th Venice Biennale presents many "firsts": Simone Legh (1967), the first black female artist representing the United States Pavilion, Sonia Boyce (1962), the first black female artist representing the British Pavilion, and the first French-Algerian female artist Zineb Sedira, who represents the French Pavilion. 1963), and the first Nordic pavilion represented by the indigenous Samí of Scandinavia.
The Polish Pavilion is no exception. For the first time in the history of the Biennale, the work of a Roma female artist, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, is the subject of the National Pavilion. For a long time, the history of the Romani people (also known as the Gypsies, a wandering people who originated in northern India and lived throughout the world) and the Sinti (who gradually migrated from India to Europe around the Middle Ages) were marginalized, excluded, distorted and persecuted in Poland and Europe, culminating in the systematic mass murder of Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust. In light of this past, Miga Tas's work in the Polish Pavilion takes the audience into those uncharted territories. Her textile installation Re-Enchanting the World reorients Roma culture in Western European classics through the depiction of contemporary Roma communities in southeastern Poland from the 17th century onwards.
View of Marguerite Miguea Tas's "Reimagining the Enchanting World" installation at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
Miga Tass's work consists of 12 large frames, each divided into three horizontal strips. The top group of each large painting is based on a series of etchings created between 1621 and 1631 by the French Baroque printmaker Jacques Callot (1592-1635) called Les Bohémiens. Carlo's Bohemians provides a visual list of stereotypes commonly associated with the Roma (e.g., portraying them as ragged soothsayers, engaging in "unseemly" practices such as stealing livestock, or being portrayed as untrustworthy "foreigners"). According to Polish pavilion curators Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza, Karlo's prints are a means of recovering narratives and visual distortions of Roma life and identity.
Jacques Carlo's copperplate engraving "Bohemians".
To reinforce the artist's reorientation of Roma visual culture, Mica Tas's paintings also mimic the composition of the frescoes in the Hall of the Months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Italy: three horizontal strips are arranged vertically to form a picture, each containing a different narrative. In the middle of each large painting, Miga Tass focuses his inspiration on the 12 constellations of the murals in the lunar room to emphasize the cyclical nature of time and the "Odyssey epic" of the Roma. Each constellation is accompanied by striking portraits, and most of them are Roma women. In an artist talk at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw on June 4, the artist confirmed the true identities of some of the women: Poland's first Roma tram conductor, Roma Holocaust survivor, Roma artist and community activist, and her own sister. Although the historical framework of art is necessary and long overdue, what shines most about Migar Tass's work is that her individuals are identified as specific people and ready to meet our gaze, their figures (existence) fill every wall in the face of centuries of prejudice and distortion.
Frescoes in the Moonbook Room of the Cifanoa Palace, Ferrara, Italy.
Left: Three-stage mural of the moon room. Right: Miga Tass's Reimagining the Fascinating World.
The bottom (bottom) of the installation takes the viewer to the artist's hometown, Czarna Góra, in the Tatra Mountains in southeastern Poland. Detached from the allegorical realm of the upper class, the artist presents an intimate observation of her community. We witnessed social gatherings such as funeral processions, people playing cards, children playing, women talking at home, and different generations harvesting potatoes in the fields. Examples of domestic tasks traditionally belonging to women's work, such as doing laundry, plucking chicken feathers or sewing, point to a central issue that Miga Tass addressed in her Zacheta speech. She calls herself a "minority feminist" and says being a Roma female artist is still not a matter of course today.
Installation view of Reimagining the Enchanting World.
Through the combination of embroidery and sewing, she combines contemporary art with the history, personal experiences and epic stories of the Roma, inspires home craftsmanship and pays homage to the "high art" of tapestries. Her choice of materials for this installation reflects her commitment to her community and the importance of sustainability in the face of fast fashion. Most of her fabrics are second-hand clothes bought from her friends, neighbors, family and local thrift stores. In some cases, the figures depicted in her paintings are spliced together from their own clothes. She often mentions her collaborators: her aunt, Stanisława Mirga; her friend, seamstress and activist Halina Bednarz; Educator Małgorzata Brońska and others. The intersection of life and art has never been so poetic, so intertwined, so inseparable from the artist and her community.
Details of Reimagining a Fascinating World, on the far left is a self-portrait of Miga Tas.
Miguea Tass works with the dignity of her community, in stark contrast to The Nature of the Game at another national pavilion at this year's Biennale, Francis Alÿs' (1959) Belgian Pavilion. Ellis' short film series documents the cases of children playing in different countries around the world, often in conflict zones, illustrating how the road to decolonization in parts of the existing art world is still long and difficult. The general message is that children are always united when playing, regardless of the environment. The work has received unanimous acclaim from the international art press, but has never raised questions about the dynamics of power between the artist, his camera, and his subjects.
View of the video installation Francis Ellis' The Nature of the Game, Belgian Pavilion.
On the other hand, Reinventing the Fascinating World gives profound meaning to the concept of community work. However, the progressive spirit that motivated Mica Tass to achieve success at the Biennale is fragile. Will more Roma artists appear on the international stage? Will more artists adopt a community-driven approach to avoid the gaze of others and tedious generalizations about them? Will more artists elevate the individual above the narrative of the universal? At the end of the day, it takes more than one artist to bring an entire community to life. Once the dust settles on the Venice Biennale, our hope is that all these communities built by Mega Tass, Simon Lee, Boyce, Sedila and others will take their place in the art world – able to transcend trends and ephemeral gestures of goodwill.
Exhibition Information:
Margaret Miguea Tas's Re-Enchanting the World is representative of the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The pavilion was curated by Wojciech Shimaevsky and Joanna Wosa. The exhibition will last until November 27.
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This article was originally created by the public account [ABAGo] director Happy Big Fat
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