MAŁGORZATA MIRGA-TAS.
REMEMBRANCE AND RESIGNIFICATION

Dates: September 29, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Curator: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
Coordinator: Alberto Figueroa y Elisa Espiau Cubiles
Space: Monumental Zone

The “other histories” that surfaced in decolonisation processes —along with their belated recognition and the break in chronological linearity which they facilitated— may not have reached certain groups residing within the colonial powers, particularly diasporic populations. For this reason, a process of remembrance and resignification is needed, especially in the wake of recent recognition, in order to shatter imposed stereotypes and allow secondary narratives to flourish. Remembering and rewriting are urgent, essential tasks that must be performed in order to tell those “other stories”. This is the precisely the aim of Malgorzata Mirga-Tas (Zakopane, Poland, 1978), a Romani activist and artist who uses the “subversive stitch” to weave visual narratives featuring women and present a positive vision of Roma culture.

Drawing on subordinated elements from the European heartland, the feminism of minorities, shared labour (such as collective weaving or quilting), and the environmentalism of reusing locally sourced second-hand fabrics, in recent years Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has produced a variety of projects which this exhibition synthesises in a particularly significant context: Andalusia, and more specifically Seville, is home to Spain’s largest Roma community. For the CAAC, it is both a necessity and an obligation to read and showcase those “other” stories and histories, and to do so with the cooperation of the residents, activists and institutions of the Polígono Sur district.

The exhibition revolves around three major projects —the most recent created especially for the occasion— and three physically smaller ones that act as interludes, offering visitors pleasure and detailed contemplation at the same tim.

Each of Mirga-Tas’s installations interact in a unique way with the spaces where they are displayed at the museum. The monumental scope of her project for the Polish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale is preserved in the former Carthusian church, where it strikes up a conversation with the building’s history, the artist’s historical inspiration, and the re-enchantment of the world which she preaches. Meanwhile, beneath the carved wooden Mudéjar ceiling in the old refectory, the Roma dwellings covered with storytelling fabrics speak of the need to decolonise museum discourses and look for new artistic strategies. Finally, in the former sacristy, the antique frames carved by Pedro Roldán that once held paintings by Zurbarán are now occupied by three enormous portraits of Andalusian Roma women who lived in different places and times, works that plead for the recognition and resignification which are so necessary here and now. In between, the artist’s folding screens, little folk chapels and wax sculpture fragments continue to demand that we attentively read those “other stories”, so close and yet so un familiar to us.

Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, curator