Giles Jackson – författare

An insightful and much-needed introduction to the life and work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, a textile artist dedicated to celebrating the vibrant heritage of the Romani community.Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (b.1978) is a Romani artist and activist who is best known for her colourful textile collages. Made from materials gathered from family and friends, and often created in collaboration with other women, these works depict the everyday life of the Romani people to challenge stereotypical representations and form what she calls ‘microcarriers of history’.This fascinating introduction explores the life and work of Mirga-Tas, contextualising her practice within Romani culture and the community in which she was raised. Bringing attention to the Romani people – their relationships, alliances and shared activities – through her visual storytelling, she also re-imagines artworks from across the centuries that have presented Romani identity in negative ways and transforms them into vibrant images imbued with strength and dignity. These works, informed by her feminist perspective and a sustained engagement with her community, combine realism with visual motifs of Romani culture, and offer a rare opportunity to see and celebrate the Roma on their own terms – both as a contemporary community and as a people with a rich heritage.

Born in South Korea in 1971, Haegue Yang is renowned for creating immersive environments from a diverse range of materials. Yang’s sculptures and installations conjure abstract narratives which play with our sensory pre-conceptions of scent, sound, light and tactility. Often using recognisable household objects, her work liberates forms from their functional context and applies new connotations and meanings to them. Interweaving industrially made objects with labour intensive and craft-based processes, Yang articulates her interest in folk and pagan cultures, and their deep connection with seasonal rituals in relation to natural phenomena. For this book and its accompanying exhibition at Tate St Ives, the context of the Cornish landscape and its ancient archaeological heritage is an important point of departure for Yang, whose work combines materials, theories and cultural references to make astute and surprising connections between local contexts and wider geographies and histories. Recurring themes of migration, postcolonial diasporas, political struggle and social mobility underpin Yang’s research, culminating in a body of work that is an apposite comment on our own time.

In 1999, Petrit Halilaj made thirty-eight drawings while living in a refugee camp in Albania during the Kosovo War (1998–9). The Tate St Ives exhibition, Halilaj’s first solo museum show in the UK, stemmed from these drawings; it is perhaps his most personal reflection to date on his experiences of war.In the monumental installation, Halilaj reconstituted elements of his original drawings in new formations, altering their material, scale and relationships to one another; in essence, it was an act of rearranging and taking control of fragments of memory that mirrors a personal and collective trauma that for Halilaj remains unfinished. While distinctive in its form, Very Volcanic Over This Green Feather is connected with a personal visual language that Halilaj has developed through a variety of media including sculpture, video, drawing and text, as well as traditional fabrics and materials.The installation and this book reflect a process of research and analysis that included extensive conversations between Halilaj and Giacomo Poli, the psychologist who had originally encouraged Halilaj and other children to make drawings in the Kukës II refugee camp in Albania more than twenty years earlier. Efforts were also made to track down specific news articles, photographs and media footage, including coverage of Halilaj meeting former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan during his visit to Kukës in 1999. These materials situate Halilaj’s own memories within a larger socio-political context.With writing from Giacomo Poli, Amy Zion, Thomas Keenan, Anne Barlow and Petrit Halilaj himself, this book is a fascinating record of an extraordinary exhibition.