Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness

Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness by Victoria Sarangova is part of Vleeshal’s International Nomadic Program 2024-2025 Repetition is a Form of Changing. This program is organized by curatorial duo League of Tenders (Elena Ishchenko and Maria Sarycheva) and consists of four seasons. Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness is the first project within the third season of the program, titled Paths of Memory, which explores who has the authority to erase and preserve memories, and in what other ways we can remember.

In her research project, Victoria Sarangova, an artist of Kalmyk-Oirat origin, weaves together archival fragments, diasporic memory in an attempt to reconstruct the silenced voices of Kalmyk-Oirat people displayed at so-called ethnological exhibitions, or human zoos, in Europe.

The title of the project — Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness (Echtheit, Neuheit, and Eigenartigkeit in original German) — borrows its words from the German “king of the zoos” Carl Hagenbeck and his impresarios, who used them as criteria to describe Kalmyks as "worthy" for his Völkerschauen (or people’s shows).

Developed in 19th-century Europe, the so-called “human zoos” became a mass phenomenon with public performances displaying living members of non-European ethnic groups, then commonly referred to as “races.” The Kalmyk-Oirat people, indigenous to the steppe region of the lower Volga River and colonized by the Russian Empire in the 18th century, participated in Hagenbeck’s ethnological shows for the first time in 1883 at the Berlin Zoo. The show was so popular that it traveled to Dresden, Paris, and Hamburg.

By the end of the 19th century, “human zoos” became a full-fledged entertainment industry and a trans-imperial endeavor, with performers recruited globally - the Kalmyks’ participation was sanctioned by the Russian Empire. Playing a large role in the racialization and othering of Indigenous and Black people, “human zoos” were part of a wider paradigm, which also included scientific institutions and ethnographic collections. Carl Hagenbeck was an honorary member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, and authorized scientists to scrutinize his performers and take photos of them. Their belongings and clothes were collected and appeared in ethnographic museums long after human zoos were closed, where their presentation reinforced the image of Indigenous people as relics trapped in (pre)history.

In one of these museums, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Victoria discovered a Kalmyk collection from Hagenbeck’s shows. She approached these objects and photos by asking: How can we go beyond the oppressive and seemingly neutral regime of archives and museums and tell the stories of the people?

Victoria follows the method of critical fabulation suggested by Black scholar Saidiya Hartman to develop her lecture performance and for her installation in the exhibition Tatar* Kiss. There are few traces or documents to be found of participants of ethnological exhibitions, but Victoria found some photographs of Kalmyk participants made at Hagenbeck’s ethnological exhibitions. With these images, she tries to imagine what their lives and experiences were like. Coming into contact with photographs of the Kalmyk participants made during Hagenbeck’s ethnological exhibitions, she tries to imagine their lives and experiences beyond this archive.

In her installation at Vleeshal, Victoria uses heavy white cotton fabric called Kalmuck, which, according to some sources, Kalmyk-Oirats used as saddle covers and brought to Europe during the Napoleonic wars, fighting alongside other Indigenous people in the Russian Army. On the cloth, Victoria recreates the glimpses of daily life visible in the photos from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, but without the usual zoo infrastructure of fences and guards, imagining the Kalmyks' paths before and after the show.

The accompanying sound piece in the exhibition is also central to the lecture performance. Victoria invited enthusiasts of the endangered Kalmyk language to restore the original pronunciation and spelling of the performers’ names that were written down by European ethnologists. Members of today’s Kalmyk-Oirat diaspora vocalized them, and this choir becomes an attempt to reclaim the personalities of these people from the dehumanizing gaze of history.

The lecture performance Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness asks how artistic practice can help us move from traditional methods of archives and ethnological museums, which still hold fragmented traces of Indigenous peoples, to sustainable ways of remembering. It invites us to hang together in the critical field of gaps and questions.

Victoria Sarangova was born in Kalmykia and is based in Berlin. She works with sound, video, text, and embroidery. Her frequently site-specific installations explore progress, memory, and identity — rooted in her homeland and informed by her family archive as well as personal history. She graduated with a BA from Central Saint Martins, London (2014), and an MA from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2020).

The sound component of the work was created in collaboration with Lidji, Ami, Anzhela, Vera, Eva, Naran, Gilyana, Alisa, Arslan, Halgina, Sükä, Namsa, Lyuuba, Khatan Bata, Polina, Gerel Palinkas, Elza Palinkas, Baine Choros, Jacques Baldachinoff, François Targiroff, Dzsemma Papdeakne Yavanova, all representatives of the Kalmyk diaspora. The recorded archive belongs to them and is used with their consent.

Victoria Sarangova thanks Maximilian Schweizer for sound mixing and mastering, and Khatan Bata for Kalmyk translation and recording.

Events

18 October

Lecture performance Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness

2 – 5 pm 

Spore Initiative