Geopoetics: Inheritance

Mukaddas Mijit

Presentation

5 December 2025, 7 – 8 pm
6 December 2025, 6 – 7 pm
7 December 2025, 10 – 11 am

Online

Curator: League of Tenders

Lutpulla. Singing the Butterflies. Watercolor, 2025. Courtesy: Mukaddas Mijit | Geopoetics: Inheritance | Mukaddas Mijit

Join us online for three sessions with artist, film-maker and ethnomusicologist Mukkadas Mijit. This program takes place as part of our current exhibition ‘Tartar Kiss’ brought to us by League of Tenders. The link to the stream will be available on this webpage.

December 5, 8pm CET

December 6, 7pm CET

December 7, 11am CET

Geopoetics is a liminal space — neither homeland nor adopted territory, but an ephemeral geography born from shared memory and temporal connections. The project unfolds as an exploration of nostalgia, where longing for a distant home collides with the immediacy of the present. Each session unfolds as an encounter: a conversation between voices, art forms, and generations, where trauma becomes language and inheritance becomes creation.Geopoetics: Inheritance is a new chapter of the collaboration with Uyghur artists, initiated by Mukaddas Mijit, and deepens the inquiry into the question of inheritance. What passes from one body to another, from one generation to the next? Mukaddas takes her personal experience of motherhood as both a starting point and a new foundation — an experience that profoundly shifts one’s perception of the world as well as the trajectory of creative practice.

— I now look at my daughter and wonder: what does she inherit from me beyond profound affection? Does she also inherit my trauma, as a Uyghur woman, as someone who carries the weight of displacement and historical violence? How can I equip her with tools to face, receive, and transform this part of her heritage, not as a burden, but as knowledge and strength?

Session 1: Poetics of the mother/land

December 5, Friday, 8pm CET

For those living in the diaspora, the bond with the mother/land is marked by the ambiguous loss of one’s mother/land. This session focuses on a collaborative project of three Uyghur women and artists, Leyla, Sonya Imin, and Yazi Ilminur Hemit, and consists of a performance and spoken poetry combined with archival video material from the Uyghur homeland.

Session 2: Reclaiming

December 6, Saturday, 7pm CET

The second session focuses on reclaiming creative ownership of Uyghur cultural memory. It consists of a musical performance by Khal1t and Mirka, two Paris-based Uyghur musicians, to reinterpret a forgotten (forbidden) Uyghur rap song, infusing it with their contemporary sound and personal stories. This act of reinterpretation becomes a homage, a way to assert that our creative lineage is still alive, and still evolving.

Session 3: Singing the Butterflies

December 7, Sunday, 11am CET

This third session unfolds as an encounter between Alma, a three-year-old Uyghur French toddler (also Mukaddas’ daughter), and Lutpulla, a Uyghur visual artist from the diaspora. Children’s songs, Uyghur storybooks, and watercolor paintings become a shared playground. The performance explores how these seemingly simple forms of expression can hold and transmit the memory and joy of belonging across time, sowing seeds of intergenerational connection even when words are missing or impossible.

Geopoetics was initiated by Mukaddas Mijit as part of Safe and Sound, the second season of the Vleeshal’s International Nomadic Program 2024–2025, Repetition is a Form of Changing. Rooted in themes of displacement and the fragmented relationship to place, the first part of Geopoetics deconstructed conventional notions of geography and belonging through collaborative audiovisual experiment, featuring six Uyghur diaspora artists.

Participating artists:

Khal1t, whose real name is Halit, is a Uyghur rapper based in Turkey and part of the country’s new wave of hip-hop artists. After seven years of dedication to his craft, he released his first official songs, FRNCH and Refakatçi, in 2025. Blending raw hip-hop energy with his cultural roots, Khal1t continues to shape his unique sound and message.

Leyla is a Uyghur photographer whose work explores the subtle poetry of everyday life. Through attentive observation and inquiry-based visual practice, she examines memory and the relationship between people and place. Her images move between documentation and imagination, investigating belonging and home through layered visual forms.

Lutpulla is a Uyghur artist based in Japan, working in digital media and watercolor. Formed in classical European schools, he developed a realistic visual language as a method, not a restriction. His work has been exhibited in various countries. Since the late 2010s, he has pursued personal research alongside commissions and editorial projects, reaching audiences far beyond his place of origin. His practice is driven by the need to project Uyghur identity into the future through imagination. The mythologies and landscapes he creates are alternate futures resisting erasure.

Mirka is a Uyghur digital director graduate from the University Léonard De Vinci in Paris. Mirka is a passionate Uyghur activist with a deep commitment to music and visual creation. Actively participating in numerous documentaries, films, and artistic projects related to his culture and Uyghur topics, he shares his experience with artists and activists, primarily focusing on the artistic aspect. In addition to his endeavors, Mirka is a musician, leading a collaborative project centered around Uyghur poems with his band, WTFKistan.

Sonya Imin is a Uyghur American artist and scholar. Her work is interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture, performance, and moving image. Having grown up between the borderlands of the Uyghur homeland, broader Central Asia, and the Midwestern United States, interrogations of belonging, home, and displacement influence the nature of her work. She has been particularly interested in exploring the somatic experiences of memory, interrogating the delineations of (dis)embodied identity, and excavations of collective consciousness through ancestral landscapes.

Yazi Ilminur Hemit is a poet who started her slam journey in the Gambia after she gained conditional freedom, and since then, poetry has become the vessel of her nomadic memories, spanning four continents and a dozen towns. She will start her MA in Uyghur Studies at UBC soon, focusing on Uyghur music and storytelling culture.

Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and artist from Urumchi, the capital of the Uyghur Region. Her work moves between research and creation, exploring the living memory of Uyghur culture through sound, movement, and storytelling. She is also involved in the cross-border musical research project Maqām Beyond Nation, through which she develops innovative practice-based research methodologies. As a filmmaker, Mukaddas has directed several documentaries and co-wrote and co-directed Nikah (2023), a fiction film that portrays the inner conflicts of Uyghur women caught between inherited traditions and political repression. Her current work, including her first feature film and various installation projects, continues to explore themes of intergenerational relationships, displacement, and inheritance.

Events

5 December