Paths of Memory
Lakisha Apostel, Victoria Sarangova, Stas Shärifullá, Ziliä Qansurá
Season
1 September – 31 October 2025
Various locations
Curator: League of Tenders
Monuments, like graves, are intended to preserve the dead and to suspend the past.
– Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 2006
Memory is not a finished book but a reverberation—an echo that lingers in the spaces between what is said and what is silenced. The third season of the International Nomadic Program 2024–2025, Repetition is a Form of Changing, curated by curatorial duo League of Tenders, Paths of Memory, navigates the tensions between who has the authority to erase and preserve memories, and how else we can remember.
The starting point for Paths of Memory is two memorials in Middelburg—the VOC Monument (2002) and the Zeeland Slavery Monument (2005). While both acknowledge the Netherlands’ role in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, neither amplifies the voices of those who carry the generational memory of enslavement. Vleeshal organized the open call for artists to design a monument for slavery in 2002–2004, but the committee that was responsible for appointing an artist for this purpose did not include any descendant of enslaved people. Nor did any of the artists who created both sculptures share this heritage.
In the rejection letter to one of the applicants, a Surinamese-Dutch artist, Vleeshal’s former director Rutger Wolfson underlined:
…this monument should become a place of reflection rather than a place of discussion. In the process of becoming aware of the communal history of enslavement, which is being brought to our attention now, there must be space for discussion (it’s about time!) since this process is not only an individual one. Besides all of this, we don’t think that discussion is the starting point for this healing program, and that recognition and comfort must come first.
We argue that it is always the right time for discussion—and that healing begins when those affected by violence are empowered to remember and preserve memory on their own terms.
The form of monuments as we know them today is designed to frame the past as fixed and beyond negotiation. Carved into stone, cast in bronze, embedded in the landscape—they appear to have always been here and to stay forever. Along with seemingly neutral ethnographic and historical museums, such monuments shape narratives that place us within histories told by others. Thus, every memorial and museum operates within a commemorative regime defined by those who have the authority and resources to build them and determine ways of remembering—and forgetting.
Paths of Memory is dedicated to the barely visible traces of those who didn’t have the authority to leave any noticeable traces and write their own history. By reconnecting with objects that retain material remnants of their cultures, the invited artists—Lakisha Apostel, Victoria Sarangova, Stas Shärifullá, Ziliä Qansurá—embrace complexity and challenge the present-day power relations inherited from the past.
Some monuments and museums, particularly those addressing enslavement, employ strategies of "remembrance and reconciliation," similar to the Slavery Monument in Middelburg. Black American scholar Christina Sharpe notes that this type of “remembrance” often becomes a synonym for “come to terms with” (which usually means move past) ongoing and quotidian atrocity.” Black Curaçaoan artist Lakisha Apostel, in her performance Echoes of the Abyss, questions this narrative of reconciliation in her performance and installation. She turns to the waters of Middelburg’s canal, which holds the memory of the ships that transported enslaved people from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas, erasing their memory and enriching Zeeland.
Other monuments obscure histories of colonial domination and imperial entanglement, offering state-sanctioned accounts of the past and denying other people their voices, such as the monument to the Bashqort horsemen near the river IJssel, close to Veessen in the Netherlands. It celebrates the Bashqort soldiers who helped liberate the Netherlands from Napoleon as part of the Russian Imperial Army, but it omits the colonization and continued oppression of the Bashqort people by the Russian state. In their audio essay Les Amours du Nord, Bashqort artists Stas Shärifullá and Ziliä Qansurá closely attend to the monument and its environment, layering river soundscapes, Bashqort songs, and the music of the quray—a traditional instrument—to make a different perspective audible.
Ethnographic museums hold collections of objects, photographs, and even human remains belonging to Indigenous, enslaved, and colonized peoples—often framing them as relics of a prehistoric past, stripped of memory and history. For her lecture performance, Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness, Kalmyk artist Victoria Sarangova engages with the Kalmyk objects and photographs held by the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which were acquired after the group of Kalmyks was displayed in so-called ethnological exhibitions—also known as human zoos—in Germany and France. In her lecture-performance, Victoria works to counter this dehumanizing framework, recalling their lives suffering that led them to be exhibited in Europe.
All these pasts that these monuments and museums preserve reverberate today. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe asks: “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” and answers: “In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” And so we ask: Who determines how we shape memory? How does a monument perform—in grand narratives and in subtle, defiant counterpoints? How can we re‑member in other ways to claim our right to produce history—and our future?
The commissioned artworks unfolded throughout September and October 2025. The installations developed as a result of the research and performative works will be presented at the exhibition Tatar* Kiss at Vleeshal until December 14.
The production of Stas Shärifullá and Ziliä Qansurá’s artwork is generously supported by the WE Jansenfonds.
Schedule:
October — Online release of an audio walk and essay by Stas Shärifullá and Ziliä Qansurá
Les Amours Du Nord
Stas Shärifullá, Ziliä Qansurá
Sound walk
29 October – 30 November 2025
Online
Curator: League of Tenders
Les Amours Du Nord by Stas Shärifullá & Ziliä Qansurá 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. Les Amours Du Nord is the third 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.Les Amours Du Nord, a three-part work by Stas and Ziliä, consists of a soundwalk, an installation in the exhibition Tatar* Kiss at Vleeshal, and a performance during the opening of Tatar* Kiss. The piece originated from a sudden encounter with a monument to a Bashqort horse archer in Veessen, the Netherlands, that replicates the imagery of “exotic” Eastern warriors, also known as les amours du Nord (Northern cupids), who helped liberate the Netherlands from Napoleonic rule. The artists, both of Bashqort heritage, carefully altered this image, using field recordings, deconstructed traditional songs, storytelling, and felt, to present this history from another perspective.
Russian historiography claims that the French used the nickname les amours du Nord for the Bashqorts, an Indigenous people of the Ural Mountains who served in the Russian Imperial Army, despite the empire’s ongoing seizure of their land and autonomy. The nickname, Northern cupids, symbolizes the perception of the Bashqorts as “brave warriors”. Even though they fought in the wars, non-Russian soldiers were labeled inorodtsy - “people of another kind” - and faced severe restrictions. Bashqorts, for example, were forbidden from owning firearms and forced to fight with wooden bows. Russia continues to utilize this image of the “brave warrior” to send historically subjugated peoples to the frontlines - most recently, in the ongoing war in Ukraine, where they again top the death toll - showcasing the persistent colonial technologies of deploying colonized people in further colonial wars.
The starting point of the project is a soundwalk that features field recordings from Veessen and its surroundings. The 15-minute soundscape depicts the peaceful environment of the harbor where the monument is located, including spontaneous comments in various languages (including Russian) by tourists encountering the monument and the image of a Bashqort horse archer for the first time. You can also hear echoes of the quray, a traditional Bashqort musical instrument, that suggests a different aural perspective. Instead of centering an “exotic” representation of a Bashqort warrior far from their native land, the audiowalk encourages us to think about the experience of the monument itself, breaking through propaganda and historical mythmaking. The soundwalk can be listened to at the monument in Veessen’s harbor, or at any other historical monument, encouraging listeners to reconsider their position, paying attention to contexts and situations rather than the “historical” figures that represent them.
The soundwalk is available on this page or through headphones as part of the installation at Tatar* Kiss, where it is accompanied by a series of felt objects by Ziliä Qansurá and a multichannel sound installation by Stas Shärifullá. Ziliä created a squad of three cupids for this installation—cherubs modeled after the romanticized figures of classical sculpture—and suspended some of them in the air. She envisions them as physical embodiments of children taken from their families, vanished into the skies above European lands. For Ziliä, the work questions why the bodies of Indigenous peoples continue to appear within narratives that center them as brave warriors. To rethink the image of les amours du Nord, she turns to felting—a traditional and culturally significant Bashqort craft she learned as a child. In the multichannel sound installation, Stas interprets the tradition of heroic songs, bait, and a specific folk song about Qahım Türä, a Bashqort commander in the Napoleonic Wars, who was reportedly poisoned by the Russian troops on his way home.
On September 27, Stas and Ziliä presented a performance during the opening of Tatar* Kiss. Stas played on a quray, traditionally made from the stem of the reed plant that grows across the Ural Mountains, Siberia, and Mongolia, which he crafted from plastic tubing during the performance. Ziliä used her voice to retell, in both Bashqort and English, the story of her encounter as a child with old women who witnessed the 1921–1924 famine in the Idel-Ural region - a tragedy that killed a quarter of the Bashqort population.
Combining sound, felt, singing, and recording, Stas and Ziliä rethink the ways of remembering and commemoration in an attempt to tell a story about their ancestors that, in many ways, remains impossible to tell.
Stas Shärifullá, aka HMOT, is an artist, researcher, and musician exploring sound, identity, memory, and listening through the lens of Yılan Bashqort heritage. Born in East Siberia (Russia), Stas engages with aural traditions of North and Central Asian cultures, focusing on how sound shapes identity and memory. As an autodidact computer musician and quraysı (traditional Bashqort flute performer), Stas practices in a wide range of media, including freeform composition, mixed-media installations, performative lectures, interventions, and more.
Ziliiä Qansurá is a multidisciplinary artist born in Bashkortostan (Russia). In her artistic practice, she combines paintings, installations and performances. In the past two years, she has more and more often returned to the felt practice and creates tapestries and sculptures addressing such issues as national and gender identities, collective trauma and Turkofuturism. Currently, Ziliä studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is based there.
October 18, 16:00 — Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness. Lecture‑performance by Victoria Sarangova. Spore Initiative (Berlin, Germany)
Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness
Victoria Sarangova
Lecture performance
18 October 2025
2 – 5 pm
Spore Initiative
Curator: League of Tenders
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 was 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 asked 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 invited 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.
October 19, 14:00–15:30 — Performance by Lakisha Apostel. Middelburg Canal and Vleeshal
Echoes of the Abyss
Lakisha Apostel
Performance
19 October 2025
12 – 1:30 pm
Balkengat 35 (Spijkerbrug)
Vleeshal (Map)
Curator: League of Tenders
Artist Lakisha Apostel presented 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 was 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 used the sculptures to interact with the water from the canal. At Vleeshal, water filled the objects, leaking and dripping. The sculptures became ritualistic tools that assisted 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 was 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 was 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.
Lakisha Apostel is a The Hague-based performance artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (1999) 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. Her practice seeks to develop language and methodologies of healing in relation to displacement, contributing to the broader discourse on uprootedness in Curaçao.
Victoria Sarangova is an artist of Kalmyk origin based in Berlin, Germany. In her practice, she explores themes of progress, memory, and identity—often rooted in the context of her homeland Kalmykia, a republic in the southwest of Russia. Drawing on multiple “in-between” standpoints—including her mixed background and ongoing migration journey—she re-calls, re-cognizes, traces, and unfolds layered histories and inherited narratives.
Stas Shärifullá, aka HMOT, is an artist, researcher, and musician exploring sound, identity, and memory through the lens of Yılan Bashqort heritage. Born in East Siberia (Russia), Stas engages with aural traditions of North and Central Asian cultures, focusing on how sound shapes identity and memory. As an autodidact computer musician and quraysı (traditional Bashqort flute performer), Stas practices in a wide range of media, including freeform composition, mixed-media installations, performative lectures, interventions, and more. Stas is based in Basel, Switzerland.
Ziliä Qansurá is a multidisciplinary artist born in Bashkortostan (Russia). In her artistic practice, she combines paintings, installations and performances. In the past two years, she has more and more often returned to the felt practice and creates tapestries and sculptures addressing such issues as national and gender identities, collective trauma and Turkofuturism. Ziliä is based in Vienna.
Series
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.