Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
Sidziom Amengie. I sewed for us. Ich nähte für uns.

After the award-winning exhibition of Vivian Suter, the Brücke-Museum invites for the second time a contemporary position to enter into dialogue with its historical collection. The visual artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, born in 1978, works in sculpture, painting and film. Collage is a fundamental design principle of her artistic works.

She has attracted international attention over the past year with her large-scale and intensely colored collages made of textiles. Mirga-Tas is Bergitka-Romni and grew up in a Roma settlement in Czarna Góra, where she still lives and works today. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and besides her artistic work, she also works as an educator and activist. The curator Joanna Warsaw writes of the work: “She creates an image of Roma as proto-Europeans, a multilingual, transcultural, and nonviolent group that reshapes conventions and decolonizes imaginary worlds.”

Her works depict everyday scenes from contemporary Roma communities, often integrating personal textiles and objects of the sitters. They show autonomous individuals beyond stereotypical representations. Based on the Brücke-Museum’s collection, these culturally and historically still predominant racist forms of representation of Roma are contrasted and thematized.

Mirga-Tas represented Poland at last year’s Venice Biennale and was represented at the last Documenta. She is currently a fellow of the DAAD’s Berlin Artists’ Program.