Weś gilaweł / The Forest Is Singing - Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the Romani artist from Czarna Góra who represented Poland at the 2022 Venice Biennale, has built a textile and sculpture installation about her family’s wartime fate. It fills the Palace Museum, the Tatra Museum’s branch at 7 Chałubińskiego Street in Zakopane. It runs from 3 September 2026 to 31 January 2027; the curator is Wojciech Szymański. The passage below is the museum’s own English text, published alongside the Polish one on its exhibition page.

Tatra Museum on the exhibition:

The exhibition is a multi-part, site-specific installation combining sculpture and textiles, created especially for the Palace Museum, which is housed in the building that formerly served as the Gestapo headquarters in Zakopane - a particularly traumatic site of remembrance on the map of the town and the region.

The artist returns to her earlier works, which addressed the genocide of the Roma and Sinti. However, this is the first time she has so openly discussed her own family’s history and that of other Carpathian Roma during the Second World War in territories occupied by the Third Reich. In this sense, The Forest Is Singing is the artist’s most personal and „Podhale-inspired” exhibition to date. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas recounts her family’s traumatic history while simultaneously questioning how history is constructed. She reveals places where history falls silent, where the narrative unravels and where there is a need to recount the past differently.

What to expect

Here the building is half the exhibition. According to the Palace Museum’s own history of the site, in 1940 the German occupiers turned the pre-war Palace guesthouse into the Gestapo post for the whole Nowy Targ district. The cellars became a prison, the rooms upstairs interrogation rooms. The installation was made for these interiors rather than brought in from another gallery, so you will not see it in this form anywhere else.

Expect the textile collages Mirga-Tas is known for, combined with sculpture. She sews them from curtains, shirts and bedsheets given by family and friends, so the fabric itself carries someone’s life story. The museum publishes neither a number of works nor a list, and no photographs of the rooms; you will judge the scale on arrival.

The opening took place on 2 September 2026 at 17:00. As the museum reports, it included a conversation with the artist about how the show was made, her family’s stories and the meaning of the building. The museum calls it her first institutional exhibition in Zakopane; the regional news sites Fakty Krakowa and Malopolskie24info are more precise and call it her first solo one. In 2022 the Władysław Hasior Gallery, another branch of the same museum, showed her bear textiles alongside work by Katarzyna Depta-Garapich.

Allow 30-45 minutes for the installation alone; that is our estimate, as the museum gives no visiting time. Add the Palace Museum’s permanent exhibition on the former “Torture Chamber of Podhale” and its prisoners and you need about an hour and a half. Only then does the story of one Romani family stand against the whole history of the house.

Context

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas was born in Zakopane in 1978 and comes from the Carpathian Roma, also known as Bergitka Roma. According to Polish Wikipedia this group arrived in Poland in several waves from the early 15th century, along the Carpathians and from historical Hungary, and took up a settled life from the 18th century onwards. Her “Re-enchanting the World”, twelve large three-part textiles modelled on the Renaissance frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, filled the Polish Pavilion in Venice in 2022. The Nazi genocide of the Roma and Sinti, the Porajmos, is remembered on 2 August: on that night in 1944 close to 2,900 prisoners of the so-called Gypsy camp at Birkenau were gassed.

Tickets and time

Buy the combined ticket: 25 PLN, reduced 12 PLN. It covers both the permanent and the temporary exhibition at the Palace. Bought separately, the temporary show costs 12 PLN (reduced 6 PLN) and the permanent one 20 PLN (reduced 10 PLN), so the combined ticket adds the second display for only 5 PLN more. Palace prices are lower than at the main building on Krupówki, so ignore the prices on the museum’s profile page.

The free Thursday applies to permanent exhibitions. The price list on the museum’s website does not mention temporary shows, so on our reading you pay for this installation on Thursdays too. Large Family Card holders pay 6 PLN for everything in the branch; residents of Zakopane and eight neighbouring municipalities named in the price list pay 1 PLN. A weekly ticket to all open Tatra Museum branches costs 69 PLN (reduced 34 PLN).

Hours: Wednesday to Sunday 10:00-18:00 (10 AM to 6 PM), closed Monday and Tuesday. The museum gives the Palace a single timetable with no seasonal change. It posts changes on the Palace Museum’s website - in 2026 the branch closed, for example, on 15 August - so check it before visiting around public holidays, especially 1 November and Christmas.

Tickets are not sold online and individual visits cannot be booked: entry is first come, first served. A guided tour costs 80 PLN and must be arranged in advance by email at palace@muzeumtatrzanskie.pl . The museum notes there is no parking at the Palace; the building is on Chałubińskiego Street, the road up towards Kuźnice.

Worth it for anyone interested in contemporary art, Romani history or the memory of the German occupation in the Tatra region; here the subject and the place say the same thing. If you are travelling with small children, choose another branch: this is a former Gestapo prison, and the show is about genocide.

English on site: the museum publishes its own English description of the exhibition, but says nothing about English wall texts or English-language tours. The exhibition page’s price list mentions an audio guide for 6 PLN without saying which languages it offers or whether it covers this installation.

What the press says

Five previews and short mentions; none judges the show itself, and we found no reviews as of 23 September 2026.

Zakopane.com (31 August 2026): its English-language guide to September events in Zakopane lists the opening and describes the show as one of the artist’s most personal and most closely tied to Podhale - article .

rroma.org, Rroma Foundation (5 September 2026): a short English note recommends the show, devoted to the memory of the Romani genocide, to anyone visiting Poland in the coming months - note .

Malopolskie24info (21 August 2026, Justyna Rosińska): a long preview treats the textiles as carriers of family memory and stresses the question of whose experiences make it into the official history of the region - article, in Polish .

Fakty Krakowa (25 August 2026, editorial team): calls it the artist’s first solo exhibition in Zakopane and writes that the former Gestapo headquarters gives silenced experiences particular weight - article, in Polish .

Wirtualna Polska, kultura.wp.pl (8 September 2026, Karolina Stankiewicz): puts the installation on a short list of September exhibitions in Poland, next to Adolph Menzel at the National Museum in Warsaw - article, in Polish .

See also

• Tatra Museum profile - the main building at 10 Krupówki Street with the permanent display on Podhale culture and Tatra nature, a good introduction before the Palace, plus the weekly ticket to all branches.
• Yishai Jusidman. Prussian Blue - another contemporary art show at a site of Nazi crime: paintings made with Prussian blue in Block 21 of the former Auschwitz I camp.
• Memory - Ewa Trafna in the women’s gallery of the Great Synagogue in Włodawa, another artist working with a building and the memory of a murdered community.

Museum profile: Tatra Museum in Zakopane .