Paths of Memory

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:

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 will unfold 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.

The production of Stas Shärifullá and Ziliä Qansurá’s artwork is generously supported by the WE Jansenfonds.

Preliminary schedule:

September — Online release of an audio walk and essay by Stas Shärifullá and Ziliä Qansurá

October 18, 16:00 — Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness. Lecture‑performance by Victoria Sarangova. Spore Initiative (Berlin, Germany)

October 19, 14:00–15:30 — Performance by Lakisha Apostel. Middelburg Canal and Vleeshal

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.