The second season of Vleeshal’s International Nomadic Program 2024–2025 draws on a performance by American artist Jana Haimson, held at Vleeshal in December 1979. In this improvised piece, Haimson combined vocalization with experimental choreography. Being among western artists who explored and developed various genres of time-based art, Haimson often uses scores as starting points for performative improvisation.

Scores were originally invented to record musical notes and make compositions reproducible, becoming tools for knowledge transmission and claiming authorship. In the second half of the 20th century, scores emerged as a distinct format within contemporary western art, serving as instructions in the broad sense of the term—either as a scheme for bringing something to life or, at times, without culminating in a subsequent performance. In many non-western and Indigenous traditions scores did not exist. Musical pieces are still transmitted through practice—by performing and repeating songs, melodies, and gestures during rituals, celebrations, or everyday activities—thus remaining primarily community-based practices that involve not only performing but also developing musical pieces.

League of Tenders invited three artists–Natalia Papaeva, Yaniya Mikhalina, and Mukaddas Mijit– of non-western origins living in various places across Europe to reflect the idea of score, produce one, and propose someone to perform it. The artists developed scores in dialogue with their compatriots, native cultures, and languages, creating space for performances to unite people across borders, within diasporas, and far from their homelands.The title of the second season, Safe and Sound, refers to the idiom meaning ‘being unharmed and free from danger.’ For League of Tenders, it becomes a way to talk about living in diasporas. Even if the body is safe, the sound of one’s language can easily be forgotten, hidden, or frozen into non-existence when barely practiced. Language is one of the focal points in the artistic practices of invited artists—the Tatar language for Yaniya Mikhalina, the Buryat language for Natalia Papaeva, and the Uyghur language for Mukaddas Mijit.

These languages hold different legal statuses in the states where the majority of Tatar, Buryat, and Uyghur peoples reside, but share the common fate of being constantly suppressed by these governments. Imperial and colonial structures implement policies that make the development of native languages impossible, resulting in the feeling of being in exile even in one’s place of origin. On September 10, 2019, Udmurt researcher and activist Albert Razin committed an act of self-immolation in protest against forced Russification and the elimination of the Udmurt language, the native language of the Udmurt people living today in the territory of the Russian Federation. During this desperate act, Razin held a poster with a quote from Rasul Gamzatov, a Dagestani poet and writer of Avar origin, written in the Avar language and first published in the USSR in russia in 1964. It reads, “And if my language is to disappear tomorrow, I am ready to die today.”

With the title of this season, Safe and Sound, League of Tenders looks to the future with hope to a time where not only bodies but also cultures and languages will remain alive and present. Inviting compatriots to perform scores within their own communities, Papaeva, Mikhalina, and Mijit create a safe and sound space to gather and reflect—a space where their languages can not only be heard but also cherished, celebrated, and loved. When participants of the projects perform the scores with their bodies, voices, and spoken words, they shape their cultures and communities as present, seen, and ‘sound.’ The scores and resulting performances embody individual, shared, and universal experiences of migration, belonging, and activism.

The season unfolds in three publications in the online magazine of NERO Editions, which will be released every Thursday, on November 28, December 5, and December 12, featuring the three newly commissioned pieces.

Natalia Papaeva

Minii Ger

For her project Minii Ger, Papaeva interviewed fellow Buryats living in the Netherlands, like herself. Drawing from their responses, she composed a song that explores the feeling of home and the sense of belonging. The song was performed by the same participants as they practiced the greeting of Sagaalgan—the Buryat-Mongolian New Year. Through this song and carefully curated setting, Natalia aims to create a space for the community to reflect, practice their rituals and reconnect to their language. Despite being performed far from their homeland, these traditions find their embodiment and continuation in their shared experience.

Natalia Papaeva is a visual/time-based artist born and raised in Buryatia (Eastern Siberia) and based in the Netherlands. Her artistic process is set in motion with text – read or written – which then translates into movements, images, sounds. Often, her endangered birth language materializes in her practice. It brings the Buryat language from the domestic sphere into the public realm and by doing so she resists the notion of endangerment. She holds a BA from the Royal Academy of Art, Hague and won the TENT Rotterdam Award in 2018 for the best video work. From 2022 to 2024 Papaeva was a resident at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Her works have been shown at HKW, M HKA, frei_raum Q21 exhibition space/MuseumsQuartier, Asian Biennial and other international platforms.

Yaniya Mikhalina

An Appeal to All Western Countries

In 1977, a group of Tatar-Bashqort workers, teachers, and engineers appealed to all western countries through an anonymous letter sent to Radio Freedom, in a desperate gesture to draw attention to the colonial politics of the Soviet Union against the Indigenous languages and reforms in the educational system. This letter, written with very emotional language, has never reached the international agenda and was silently stored in the Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest for almost 50 years. Sadly, history repeats itself: the amount of people speaking Indigenous languages in the so-called russian federation is continuously decreasing. Reading the letter one gets a feeling it was written today, addressing the recent twists of colonial legislation: in 1977, the education in Indigenous languages was canceled; in 2017, classes in Indigenous languages stopped being an obligatory part of the school curriculum. In her sound work, Mikhalina invites contemporary Tatar and Bashqort language activists to re-enact the letter that has been translated from Russian to Tatar, Bashqort, and English, blending it with an effort to imagine a Tatar-Bashqort soundscape. Layering Indigenous instruments, archival, and staged sounds, Appeal to All Western Countries is an ironic attempt to address the international community once again.

Yaniya Mikhalina is a Volga Tatar research-based artist based in Oslo, navigating postcolonial realities, its difficult pasts, and possible scenarios for reparative futures. She works across disciplines, mainly with (moving) image, sound, archive, and non-exemplary material heritage, often sourced from family archives and contemporary political conditions. She is particularly interested in how the gaze is produced, represented, and historicized within documentary contexts. Mikhalina is about to finish her PhD in artistic research at the Trondheim Art Academy, NTNU, titled The Colonial Madness: Feminist-Indigenous Cosmologies.

Mukaddas Mijit

Geopoetics

Geopoetics is a collaborative audiovisual experiment led by Mukaddas Mijit, featuring five Uyghur diaspora artists. Rooted in themes of displacement and the fragmented relationship to place, the project deconstructs conventional notions of geography and belonging. Through loosely defined instructions (score), the artists responded with a mosaic of soundscapes and visual narratives, exploring the emotional and physical landscapes of their current surroundings.

This work inhabits a liminal space—neither homeland nor adopted territory, but an ephemeral geography born from shared memory and temporal connections. Geopoetics shapes as an exploration of nostalgia, where longing for a distant home collides with the immediacy of the present. The bodies, movements, sounds and voices map the tension between rootedness and motion, forging a communal yet fluid space of belonging.

At its core, Geopoetics invites audiences to reflect on how displacement reshapes identity, memory, and the spaces we inhabit. It is not a search for a new homeland but a reimagination of spatiality and temporality, creating a living archive of diaspora experience.

Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker and artist. Originally from Urumchi, the capital of the Uyghur autonomous region, Mijit obtained her PhD in 2015 from the University of Paris-Nanterre. In her research and artistic practice, she often works with the Uyghur diaspora to raise awareness of the current crisis in the Uyghur region. She is a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she is looking at the artistic response of the Uyghur diaspora to the humanitarian crisis in the Uyghur Autonomous Region. Being involved in the Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region project, she develops innovative research methodologies. As scriptwriter and director, Mijit released the film Nikah (2023), which explores the challenges faced by Uyghur women caught between traditional social pressures and political repression in China.

Partners:

NERO is an international publishing house devoted to art, criticism and contemporary culture. Founded in Rome in 2004, it publishes artists’ books, catalogs, editions and essays.

NERO explores present and future imaginaries beyond any field of specialization, format or code – as visual arts, music, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, or fictional narrations – extensively investigating unconventional perspectives and provocative outlooks to decipher the essence of this ever-changing reality.