Echoes of the Abyss
Lakisha Apostel
Performance
19 October 2025
12 – 1:30 pm
Blankengat 35 (Spijkerbrug)
Vleeshal (Map)
Curator: League of Tenders
On Sunday, October 19, a durational performance, Echoes of the Abyss, by artist Lakisha Apostel will take place as part of the International Nomadic Program 2024–2025 Repetition is a Form of Changing.
Schedule of the performance Echoes of the Abyss:
14:00 - Start, Blankengat 35 (Spijkerbrug)
14:20 - Continue, Markt 1 (Vleeshal)
15:30 - End, Markt 1 (Vleeshal)
Artist Lakisha Apostel presents a performance and sculptural installation titled Echoes of the Abyss (both are also presented in the exhibition Tatar* Kiss). In this work, she explores the traces of the slavery trade in Middelburg and questions the narratives of reconciliation, asking us to look beneath the surface of seemingly calm or familiar places and recognize that they may still carry hidden histories of violence and brutality.
In his Poetics of Relation, Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant describes "the unconscious memory of the abyss" held by enslaved people and their descendants. He refers to the Atlantic Ocean—its irreversible routes and depths burying thousands of enslaved. Lakisha traces the starting point of these passages in Middelburg, making the water of the Canal through Walcheren the central part of her project.
The starting point of her performance is located close to the former harbors of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie, the Dutch West and East India Companies. There, they built ships that carried enslaved, uprooted people from the West Coast of Africa to the plantations in the Caribbean and brought back sugar, tobacco, and cocoa. The vessels of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie alone deported over 268,000 enslaved. Lakisha’s clay sculptures resemble the bellies of these ships. Some of the objects include cowry shells that were used as ballast, but also as currency to pay for enslaved people.
Lakisha sees the canal and its waters as vessels that keep the memories of those events. During the performance, Lakisha will use the sculptures to interact with the water from the canal. At Vleeshal, water fills the objects, leaking and dripping. The sculptures become ritualistic tools that assist in commemorating the enslaved ancestors and reconnecting with their experiences. Dripping water haunts us and reminds us of the brutalities it has witnessed, resisting the deceptive narratives of reconciliation that leave no space for the memory of displacement and continuous inequality.
This program 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. Echoes of the Abyss is the second 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.
Lakisha Apostel is a The Hague-based performance artist, born in Rotterdam and raised in Curaçao. Her work explores the relationship between the body, space, and memory, often through durational or site-specific performances. Through embodied rituals in which the body interacts with apparatuses and surrounding space, Lakisha aims to address displacement and the longing for belonging, specifically how uprootedness exists and functions in her homeland of Curaçao.
Lakisha Apostel thanks Shaydiyah Granviel and Aïshah Granviel for performing, and Sol Archer for videorecording and editing.
Events
19 October
Performance Echoes of the Abyss
12 – 1:30 pm
Blankengat 35 (Spijkerbrug)Vleeshal
Free EntranceSeries
Repetition is a Form of Changing is a program developed by the new curators for Vleeshal’s Nomadic Program 2024-2025: Maria Sarycheva and Elena Ishchenko who form the curatorial duo League of Tenders.
League of Tenders envisions Repetition is a Form of Changing as a collective attempt at rehearsing and practicing non-imperial and anti-colonial ideals. The program consists of Four Seasons. For each Season, League of Tenders will invite non-Western artists, musicians, filmmakers, and choreographers to approach and repeat one of Vleeshal’s previous projects and question the (western) knowledge behind feminism, language, ecology, and care. They will revisit these concepts and discuss them from their own perspectives. By placing these concepts in underrepresented international art contexts, League of Tenders proposes new perspectives and enacts the necessary process of changing. This collective rehearsal will be approached from the perspectives of Indigenous people reconnecting with their cultures, colonized people resisting colonial oppression, and displaced individuals searching for a home beyond their homeland. Repetition is a Form of Changing will extend beyond state borders, encompassing localities such as Idel-Ural, North and South Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia. Various independent initiatives and collectives based in these locations will join League of Tenders during the events of Vleeshal’s Nomadic Program 2024-2025 in order to spark and support translocal networks of solidarity.
League of Tenders is an imaginary organization and curatorial duo established in 2018 by curators, researchers, and friends Elena Ishchenko and Maria Sarycheva aimed at cultivating collectivities and fostering the affective dynamics within them. Over time, League of Tenders has focused on disability representation, overcoming the alienation of everyday labor, practices of care, support, and friendship in the age of disasters. Their projects disrupt traditional forms, seeking to place concepts, people, and artworks in unexpected contexts and inviting them to engage in dialogue. The duo has been appointed as Vleeshal's nomadic curators for Vleeshal's Nomadic Program 2024-2025.
Elena Ishchenko is a curator, researcher and, activist. In her practice, Elena Ishchenko is nurturing a decolonial approach to curating and knowledge production, while addressing power relations inherited from colonial policies, particularly within the russian* context. She has worked as a curator at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art (Krasnodar, russia), a researcher at the Garage Museum (Moscow, russia), and has developed exhibitions, educational initiatives, workshops, and other projects in russia, Germany, Armenia, Switzerland, among others. Her recent projects include Өмә (nGbK, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2023), an exhibition that represented the complexity of russia as a colonial realm through stories of artists of Indigenous, migrant, and racialized backgrounds, and Translocal Dialogues (online, 2022), which sought to weave solidarity networks by inviting cultural workers from various contexts to share their experiences, thoughts and feelings on wars, decolonial possibilities, forced migration, and state violence.
Elena is based in Cologne, Germany.
Maria Sarycheva was born in Ufa, Bashqortostan. From 2012 until 2023, she worked independently as a curator and educator in various regions of russia. In 2015, she initiated the Department of Inclusive Programs at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2019, she established the Department of Access and Inclusion at the State Tretyakov Gallery and served as its Head until March 2023. Besides dealing with architectural barriers, she was also responsible for the accessibility of museum content and collection for blind people and people with low vision; D/deaf and hard of hearing community; and for visitors with diverse developmental and learning disabilities.
Currently, Maria lives as a nomad, wandering somewhere between Berlin and Bashqortostan. Her research interests include care, feminist theory and practice, and disability history.
*League of Tenders uses “russia” and “russian” in lowercase to condemn the war against Ukraine unleashed by russia and its policy in general, and to express solidarity with Ukrainians and the participants of decolonial movements.