We won't stay silent any longer
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
Last week I introduced the current exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh: ‘The dead don’t go until we do’.
From the exhibition booklet:
As Rebecca Solnit has argued throughout her political writing, we live in an age where forgetting is everywhere. Contemporary politics operates on short timescales, obscuring the power of people and grassroots movements to effect change, which can take years or even decades. But where forgetting can lead to despair, remembering can lead to hope.
The dead don’t go until we do brings together four artists who demonstrate how we stand hand in hand with those who came before us...
…In the background of each of these projects is a sense of nature and an awareness of how traditions and systems of knowledge that root communities have been broken. Without a nation, or stable and dignified place to call home, the stories carried from family to family, friend to friend, mean everything. Here, landscapes, plants and animals are also called to bear witness.
The exhibition is a physical journey through four different spaces. Four different installations, each one presenting a perspective on histories of marginalisation, struggle, suffering, and loss.
As usual, I hadn’t researched anything before going, wanting to feel my own impressions and reactions before getting into explanations and context. On this occasion that led me into some tricky water, particularly with the first exhibit, the work of Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas.
Her work was the most conventionally presented, in the sense of being large flat images, hung on the walls of a familiar ‘white cube’ space. But the walls were a strong cobalt blue, which immediately shifted something in my experience. The images themselves were brightly coloured, and the blue walls seemed to lift them up towards me in a way that began to dissolve the sense of being in any kind of familiar art space.
For a start, these were not paintings, but fabric collages.
I’ve been writing in recent weeks about art and beauty beyond galleries, looking at cushions and lampshades, pottery, clothing, curtains. And now here I was in a very serious art gallery, looking at large crafted rectangles of coloured fabric collage. The stitched shapes felt like a bridge between the broader ideas of art in the world that I had been exploring, and a new, different kind of presence in the ‘proper art world’, which I had never experienced before.
Colour. Fabric. Stitching. Raw edges. Witnesses to the handling of material; fine threads securing a fringe, a trimmed curve. Three-dimensional folds of stiff sparkling green, folded lace.
I didn’t know how to respond. It reminded me of being in the Palestinian Museum in Edinburgh last year, when different parts of my mind struggled to reconcile my ideas about art, my visceral responses and personal preferences, with my fragments of knowledge about the situation in Gaza.
Here there were bright collages of family groups, portraits of women and children. They were aesthetically pleasant, not strikingly unusual. But then I read something about the fabrics being from the clothes of people the artist knew, and that the groups were often family and ancestors. I felt myself slowly beginning to shift from assessing the pieces from the perspective of whether or not they worked for me as visual art, to becoming curious about why they had been made, and what the images meant to their maker. Less concerned with how I felt about them, and more interested in the story that they had been made to tell; the circumstances that had birthed them.
Siukar manusia means ‘wonderful people’ and reminds us of the persecution of Roma people during the Holocaust. Wanda Siwak survived imprisonment in a concentration camp but was never able to find her daughter again after hiding her from the Nazis. On her deathbed she passed the search to her nephew, Edward Dunka, who eventually found her daughter’s family living in Ukraine. The Nazis murdered an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Roma people.
Gallery information
This fabric collage is taken from a stock photograph entitled, ‘Antique travel photographs of Constantinople (Istanbul): Gypsy camp’. The work of a blacksmith would have supported their whole family. Here, Mirga-Tas focuses on one of the blacksmith’s daughters, using a starry sky to represent ancestral connections. In Romani culture the blacksmith’s forge (the furnace used for working metals) symbolises creativity. Blacksmiths are alchemists, poets and artists, who transform matter and bring new things into the world.
Gallery information
The images were asking me to drop my limited ideas about art what might be, and instead listen to something new. I saw how so much of the way that I approach art is tied to making judgements. Does it move me? Do I feel something? Is it exciting? It began to dawn on me that I had no right to be judging what was here in relation to the perspectives of European art history, or the norms of the art world, or my own personal experiences and desire for aesthetic satisfaction. The only way to be in this exhibition was to switch into receiving mode. What was here; why, and what was the story it wanted to tell?
The works in this series challenge some early stereotypes of Roma people. They come from a series of etchings by artist, Jacques Callot called The Gypsies or Life of the Egyptians (1621-1631). Roma people were mistakenly thought to have come from Egypt, but are originally from India. Callot engraved demeaning messages on his works (‘poor beggars’) and suggestions that Roma people were criminal (‘You who take pleasure in their words, watch out for your coins’). His images make them look dirty, ragged and miserable. At the time, Roma people were seen as outsiders.
While the Roma have often had to flee persecution, most do not choose a ‘nomadic life’. The Bergitka Roma - of which Mirga-Tas is a part - have been settled in Poland since the eighteenth century. Mirga-Tas reworks Callot’s images to reflect Roma family life, hard work, and home-making. They show people together, caring for each other with dignity.
Gallery information
It was me who recently said that I was looking for stories in paintings.
Sometimes I can feel the story through my own experience of the world, as in the case of Samantha Clark’s paintings. Other times I make my own story in response to images which may have a different story for someone else, or for the artist; I don’t need to be told anything because my own life experiences create a narrative that makes sense to me. And sometimes, this exhibition said to me, you need to be told why a piece of art was made, and what its purpose is designed to be in the world.
In this case, the art matters because of who made it, what their intentions were, and the story it’s designed to tell. Does this make it conceptual, or contextual, or political? I don’t know and I don’t care.
This work is designed to communicate with people outside of the world of its creators; to say, we are here, and this is what matters to us. The stories you have imposed upon us are not real. Please listen.
What an incredible show. I think in this case and with most art that what our head and heart first says about something is still valid but that in some cases those initial feelings and thoughts can be shifted or deepened by learning more about the artist’s intentions.
As artists we know that what we make goes away from us quickly and becomes something or nothing to others that experience it.
P.S. I love those cobalt walls so much. I enjoy it when curators shape the space to work with the art/collection in meaningful ways.