RomaMoMA Nomadic Library accompanies the exhibition An Alternative Story, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

The RomaMoMA Nomadic Library, ERIAC’s itinerant library of contemporary Roma literary, artistic and cultural knowledge, accompanies contemporary Romani textile artists Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s current exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. The exhibition runs from November 22nd, 2025 until March 15th, 2026 and offers a singular retrospective of Mirga-Tas’s textile world. This selection of books was curated by the RomaMoMA initiative and aims to contextualise the current positionality of Romani artists and creators. They are available to be enjoyed by the general public within the museum space and are stored on ADJACENT.

ADJACENT is the mobile knowledge device conceived for RomaMoMA by artist Daniel Baker in 2021 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the First World Romani Congress. ADJACENT is a development of the artist’s interest in the relationship between the virtual and the embodied, and the representation of abstract thought through physical and optical means. Calling to question mechanisms of knowledge distribution and the construction of meaning which lay at the heart of Roma visual culture, the concept of the table’s design is to create a physical barcode of We Roma: a Critical Reader in Contemporary Art. As the artist explains:

The ADJACENT design concept represents the first in a series of functional objects that can each relate to a particular book from the collection. As well as activating links beyond the physical, ADJACENT also offers the opportunity to focus attention on specific elements of the Nomadic Library, depending upon the geographic or contextual location of its presentation.

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, ©Marek Kruszewski

Often linked to historical narratives that frequently perpetuate stereotypes as external representations, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas paints an intimate picture of the everyday life of the Romani through her visually powerful combination of different textiles and patterns. Family, community, solidarity, and self-empowerment, as well as exclusion and persecution, are the defining themes in the work of the artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (born 1978 in Zakopane, Poland). Through her textile “paintings”, she connects the past and the present and tells a different, alternative story of unseen and marginalized people. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas focuses on the lives of the Romani people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, who have been marginalized, discriminated against, and persecuted in Europe since the fourteenth century—and often still are today. 

Mirga-Tas contrasts her powerful and sensitive images with the negative and stereotypical perceptions of Romani people that still prevail today. In doing so, she brings to the fore voices and stories that are otherwise rarely heard. With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is showing the work of this extraordinary artist on this scale for the first time in Germany, including parts of the cycle Re-enchanting the World, with which Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has caused an international sensation since her appearance at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The exhibition is an international collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Luzern (Switzerland) and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Norway), supported by the LEAP Art Foundation, the Polish Institute Berlin, and the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation.

Fore more information visit:

https://www.kunstmuseum.de/en/exhibition/malgorzata-mirga-tas-eine-alternative-geschichte/