AUTHENTICITY, NOVELTY, AND UNIQUENESS

2025

Textile installation: Kalmuck fabric, hand embroidery, audio

Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, NL; Spore Initiative Berlin

Part of Tatar* Kiss group exhibition, curated by League of Tenders

Authenticity, Novelty, and Uniqueness examines the histories of Kalmyk-Oirat people who were presented in European ethnological shows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On Kalmuck fabric, I reconstruct glimpses of everyday life visible in archival photographs, removing the usual infrastructure of the shows—fences and guards—and imagining the participants’ paths before and after them.

The accompanying audio brings together Kalmyk-Oirat diaspora voices pronouncing participants’ names, collaboratively restored from erroneous ethnographic transcriptions. 

The research behind the installation is further expanded through a lecture-performance, where archival material and critical fabulation become a way to explore how these histories can be approached without reproducing the ethnological gaze.

Translation and recording: Bata Khatan, Victoria Sarangova

Sound production: Victoria Sarangova

Mixing and mastering: Maximilian Schweizer

Photo documentation: Valya Fetisov