Manuela Caniato Textile Art

The exhibition offers a meditation on cycles of life, history, and cultural identity. The most compelling contribution comes from Polish-Romani artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, whose large-scale textile works dominate the walls.

Mirga-Tas’s textile collages, composed of vibrant fabrics and intricate stitching, explore themes of migration, community, and memory. The artist uses traditional Romani patterns and motifs to recontextualize the history of her people, elevating the often overlooked stories of Romani communities and positioning them in dialogue with broader European history.

In particular, her work in this exhibition echoes the frescoes in the Main Hall of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, where allegorical figures and symbols illustrate the passage of time and the cycles of life. Similarly, Mirga-Tas’s tapestries weave together past, present, and future, creating a visual narrative that transcends any single moment in time. Her art addresses the cyclical nature of existence, much like the Renaissance frescoes, and invites the viewer to consider how personal histories are intertwined with larger, historical forces.

In “This Is Not the End of the Road,” Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s work takes on even greater significance through her collaboration with Dutch-Romani artist Morena Bamberger. Their joint work emphasizes the importance of collective memory and shared experiences within Romani communities.

I very much admired Mirga-Tas’s vivid collages but I honestly expected them to touch me much more. It is a rare occurrence so see a personal exhibition to admire the works of a woman and a textile artist in a major European museum. Maybe I expected too much, but I didn’t feel the emotions I expected.

My favorite works by Mirga-Tas are the simpler portraits of women, whose more modest dimensions likely made them feel more relatable. In contrast, the Schifanoia cycle, with its imposing dimensions (462 x 387 cm), filled an entire room with its grandeur.