When no one seems to know about your home country and your mother-tongue is about to disappear, who are you then? How do emigration and integration influence your cultural identity? And which words do you employ, to sculpt your self and your heritage?
Natalia Papaeva (Russia, 1989) grew up in Buryatia, an autonomous republic in Eastern Siberia. Since 2013, she has been living in the Netherlands, where she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art the Hague in 2018. Her raw, intense performances investigate our relationship with language and her own cultural identity as ‘Buryat om utens’*.
Behind the windows of several locations throughout the center of Leeuwarden, VHDG will present her first solo exhibition. All video works in the exhibition are in Buryat, Papaeva’s mother-tongue. Buryat is one of almost 2600 languages threatened with extinction. The physical distance to her homeland equally influences her bond with her language and birthplace.
In her videoworks and performances, Papaeva gives voice to this cultural ‘erosion’, exploring its effects on one’s identity. The prizewinning Yokhor (2018) shows her undergoing the pain of losing her language, progressing through different emotional states, from calmness to hysteria. Language is investigated again as a carrier of emotions in Vacuum (2019), in which she tries to exorcise her fears with mantra’s her grandmother once taught her.
For this exhibition particularly, Papaeva developed a new video work. In the summer of 2020, the artist stayed in the Artist-of-Residence of VHDG for four weeks, at the Haniahof in Leeuwarden. I am… is a performance work made in response to the racism she experienced during the first wave of the corona epidemic because of her Asian appearance. In it, she investigates culturally defined, linguistic connotations and holds up a mirror to the viewer in a lighthearted yet confronting way. This performance will be held live on two dates and is seen as a video work at the entrance of the exhibition.
Papaeva graduated from the Royal Academy of Art the Hague in 2018. Her graduation film Yokhor won her the department prize of her academy, as well as the TENT Academy Award. In 2019, Papaeva was nominated for the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize. In 2020 she received a Stipendium for Emerging Artists from the Mondriaan Fund.
* Frysians lovingly call a Frysian, who lives outside of Friesland a ‘Fries om utens’.
Curator: Arda van Tiggelen
Graphics: Niels Lunter
Texts: Grytsje Klijnstra
With support from: Gemeente Leeuwarden, Mondriaan Fonds, BankGiro Loterij Fonds, Stichting Stokroos en WEJansenfonds.
Download the map at the VHDG-website.
