Delaine Le Bas and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas on Roma art and culture
Delaine Le Bas and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas share stories about their creative influences, life experiences and proud cultural heritage with Hettie Judah.
A version of this article first appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
Who is Delaine Le Bas?
Born in the UK in 1965, Delaine Le Bas works across media including performance, sound and painting, exploring feminist issues as well as questions of nationhood and land rights. In 2007, her work was included in the first Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, alongside that of her husband and long-term collaborator Damian Le Bas, who died in 2017. A nominee for the 2024 Turner Prize, her work will be on show in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain and can also be seen in the exhibition Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding at Tramway, in Glasgow.
Who is Małgorzata Mirga-Tas?
Born in Poland in 1978, where she is still based, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (also known as Gosia) works with appliqué and embroidery to create pictorial works inspired by Roma history, identity and mythology. In 2011 she founded the Jaw Dikh! international residency programme for Roma and non-Roma artists, and in 2022 she became the first Roma artist to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale. This October, her textile collages will be the subject of her first major UK solo exhibition, at Tate St Ives.
Hettie Judah: How did you first encounter one another’s work?
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: I first knew Delaine’s work from books and the internet. I really liked it and was very impressed with Delaine and Damian’s involvement in the first Roma Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. I later met them both, and we became friends at the Jaw Dikh! residency that I organise in Czarna Góra in Poland. Her works are a reflection of her, of who she is, and, for me, she is a Roma feminist, a revolutionary. She is one of those artists who, through her sensitivity, can – in an incredibly interesting way – touch on subjects that are sometimes problematic for most of society. I believe that we have a similar sensitivity towards identity.
Delaine Le Bas: Gosia got in contact with me after she founded her Polish residency, and Damian and I spent time with her, her husband, Marcin, and other artists there over a number of years. There are connections in our work but our perspectives are different due to location. When I was born in England in the 1960s, my extended family dressed and looked very different to everyone else. The environments they lived in were a reflection of that. It was an all-encompassing aesthetic in terms of pattern, colour and different sorts of surfaces, and that’s still there in my work: it’s had a massive influence.
MM-T: When I first started to organise educational and artistic workshops to progress children in the Roma settlements, I eventually focused on textile workshops. I realised that there is no awareness of the history of the Roma community, and the women are completely invisible. The Roma girls, especially, needed role models. So, I made portraits of well-known Roma women from our history in Poland, such as Alfreda ‘Noncia’ Markowska, Krystyna Gil, Teresa Mirga and international figures such as Esma Redžepova, Nicoleta Bitu, Rosa Taikon and many more. I also portrayed important women from the communities, to show invisible stories within the families of the girls that I worked with, and to make the work of important people like Delaine visible, to highlight the contributions that Roma women have made as artists, poets, writers, activists and political leaders. This is also important for the majority community that doesn’t see the contributions that Roma women make to society at large.
DLB: I studied fashion and textiles at St Martin’s School of Art in London, so I’m interested in the history of colours and clothing as social markers. I do performance, so my interest in clothing is reflected in that as well. If you’ve got a T-shirt with a slogan on, who’s reading it? What message is it sending? In the past I’ve used a lot of found materials – part of that was my interest in recycling and disregarded items. I don’t use so many found materials any more. I create my own fabrics and own motifs now.
MM-T: When I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2004 I was doing sculptures and paintings. I first used textiles in my painting to provide texture and add a more personal element, and I gradually started to incorporate pieces of my own and my family’s clothes. In 2016, as part of the exhibition ‘Chłopy Pany – Pany Chłopy’ [at the open-air museum in Nowy Sącz, Poland], I dressed the rooftops of original Roma houses from the 1960s, which were then transferred to the ethnographic museum in Nowy Sącz. For this site-specific intervention I used the bedsheets and clothes from the family storage and stitched them together to cover the houses. I started to reflect on textile as a medium that not only represents the Roma community physically but also carries energy, experiences and memory. There’s also an ecological dimension: recycling and giving materials a second life. All these elements come together for me in using textiles. As artist Louise Bourgeois said – threads are a way of bringing together.
DLB: I was raised by a very independent, strong-minded woman in my grandmother. She didn’t live indoors until she was 21. When she had my mother in the 1940s, she wasn’t married, which was not an ideal situation. (She later met my grandfather, who was fantastic.) My family was very traditional, in many ways. It wasn’t easy for me to go to college. I have four siblings, and I’m the only one who finished school. My grandmother was determined that if we wanted to do something, she would create a space for it. In 1991, someone I knew from art school got me a book called Angry Women [by Andrea Juno]. I think that says it all! It had Medusa on the front cover – she figures a lot in my work. I am also interested in the witch hunts that are tied in with the history of capitalism and the Enclosure Acts. One of the most important works I made with Damian was Safe European Home? [2011], which we first built outside the Viennese Parliament. It was about ‘Fortress Europe’ and the borders getting tighter, people not being able to move, and economic situations getting worse. It troubles me that a lot of our work was about precarity, hoping things would get better. It seems they haven’t.
MM-T: What dominates today is uncertainty. If we think about the war in Ukraine and how it specifically affects the Roma community, we see multiple discriminations playing out. Ukrainian Roma refugees are not treated the same as other Ukrainian refugees: they are a secondary category. It is typical of the Roma situation historically and today. As a community we now have our own voice to create a counter discourse. But any time I think there has been progress there’s always some event that shows we’re still in the same place. When I travel and speak with other Roma communities these problems point to the fact that we continue to be excluded and marginalised throughout Europe.
DLB: I’ve worked predominately in Europe since 2006. Now I’m showing more in England, but that’s been very slow to happen. When I finished college in 1988, no one really wanted to show me, mainly because it was considered difficult to show ‘gypsy’ work. It’s much easier now but it’s been a difficult road, with a lot of hard, grassroots work. I’ve always had people in the UK who have supported my work – including curators Emma Dexter and Christine Eyene – and I’ve collaborated with [artist] Barby Asante. We did a touring show called To Gypsyland [2014]. But this support has been quite underground. I was really shocked that I’d been nominated for the Turner Prize. But it feels good for younger people from our communities to see that it is possible. That the hard work over the decades has paid off. I think that comes from centuries of survival: we keep going.
MM-T: I also work collaboratively, and that’s based in trust, and sharing with people who are close with you. Working with people who respect you and who understand you – and that you respect and understand in return. I approach it with an open mind and an open heart so that I can learn from the people I work with.
DLB: In my work there are lots of things that I want to do but I don’t have the technical skills for. So, it’s very important for me to have established relationships with people: it’s almost like another family. I’ve been working with the photographer Tara Darby since 2005. Tara has a massive archive of work about me and Damian. I have got to where I have because of people working together and sharing, and it’s important to give that back out into the world.
MM-T: I didn’t believe that it could ever be possible for me to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale, but the curators convinced me that it was worth a try. I was also shocked when I won the competition. Generally, the pavilion was very well received. I had excellent feedback from the Roma and other minority groups because they felt it broke a glass ceiling for them: a step towards representing a nation from a minority perspective. Any time that there was press or a public event, I would highlight that this was a Polish Roma Pavilion.
DLB: It’s also important for me to be open about how I feel: the personal is within my work. 2017 was not an easy year for me. I lost my Great Uncle Eddie – who I was very close to – on Valentine’s Day. In May, my father died, and then, in December, Damian died. That was very unexpected and it was a traumatic time. Recently, my grandmother died as well. For me, it’s important to go through these experiences fully, to go to the depths, and then resurface. Things are circular – I’ve got grandchildren – so life takes a different turn.
MM-T: A lot of my work also commemorates people who have passed away. The trauma of the past and, specifically, the Second World War is ever-present despite the decades. I grew up with stories of the war and spend a lot of time trying to commemorate people and digesting the trauma of the community. The exhibition at Tate St Ives will include new works that reflect on our Roma history from a feminist or female perspective.
DLB: My work that’s been nominated for the Turner Prize – Incipit Vita Nova [shown at Secession in Vienna last year] – is related to my grandmother’s death but also to new beginnings [the title translates as ‘Here Begins the New Life’]. It is predominantly fabric and painting. There are also some sculptural elements, a soundscape, and a film of a performance. Part of the show in Vienna that was on the floor is now hanging in my show at Tramway with the Declaration of Human Rights on it. There are underlying things in the work about movement: who gets to move and who doesn’t get to move. The image of the horse in Incipit Vita Nova represents this black china horse that was in the cabinet in my grandmother’s front room. Underneath it was my first pair of little red felt boots. So, the horse and the boots in the show represent that history. Part of the show is about chaos because it was a very difficult time. And chaos also reflects what’s going on out in the bigger world. How can you make art in chaos, or when someone is dying? But as artists, we continue to make work under these circumstances.
Turner Prize 2024, Tate Britain, 25 September to 16 February 2025. 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Tate St Ives, 19 October to 5 January 2025. 50% off entry and exhibitions with National Art Pass.
A writer, curator – most recently of ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’, a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition – and co-founder of the Art Working Parents Alliance.
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