Tacit Tongues

Language is an active site of struggle, memory, and repair. It has always served both as a tool of control and silencing, and as a vehicle for emancipation and empowerment.

 

Mongolian artist Nomin Zezegmaa, Buryat artists Mila Balzhieva and Natalia Papaeva, and the Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars each, in their distinct way, use words, letters, and symbols to disrupt power relations, reclaim lost knowledge, and address cultural and historical traumas. Tacit Tongues responds to a legacy of adaptation and erasure experienced by cultures and languages throughout the twentieth century—particularly in Mongolia and the culturally kindred Republic of Buryatia in Eastern Siberia.

 

Inspired by Buryat oral tradition and written text, Papaeva creates performances, video works, and installations that incorporate storytelling, singing, and movement to bring her endangered language from the private sphere into public view. She uses her body and voice as mediums of active remembering, addressing the ephemerality of memory and resisting erasure.

 

Reimagining a poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov—one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism—through the Buryat language, the video installation The Year I Decided to Become My Own Moon (2024) turns to the moon as a constant presence offering solace in times of hardship. When words are no longer enough to carry sorrow, humming becomes a quiet form of healing.

 

Papaeva’s latest work, The Mountain with a Big Nose (2025), commissioned specially for this exhibition, reclaims the Mongol bichig—the native script replaced by Cyrillic in both Buryatia and Mongolia during the twentieth century. By using its vertical letters to inscribe a Russian-language poem she composed about a mountain named Lenin in her native village, she learns the Mongolian script through the Russian language—a language that is at once native to her, and yet foreign.

 

Drawing from Mongol cosmogony, Zezegmaa investigates and interweaves histories and matter in relation to deep time and other-than-human realms. A recurring practice throughout her work is Writing Without Writing, a speculative and embodied departure from the traditional Mongolian script. Rather than replicating the form of Mongol bichig, she focuses on the physical gesture and imagined experience of writing, blurring the boundaries between script, drawing, symbol, and sigil.

 

Resonating with Writing Without Writing, her painting practice also marks a departure from a classical understanding of the medium. Instead, it becomes an alchemical process in which the canvas is treated as a transmutable membrane, generating skin-like layers—as exemplified in Liquid Thought (2023), Presence (2024), and ᠠᠯᠳᠠ ᠪᠶᠡ, ᠰᠡᠳᠬᠯ, ᠪᠳᠤᠯ (Body, Soul, Thought) (2024).

 

Crossing into the geological realm, Zezegmaa’s Writing Without Writing (Writing in Stones) (2022) and Drifter (2024) invoke stones as vessels of time and silent witnesses to history.

 

Balzhieva’s practice is informed by her Buryat cultural heritage and Shamanic spiritual traditions, through which she considers how humans relate to the non-human world. In her textile series Glossopteris and Latex, she imagines extinct plants as visual symbols, echoing calligraphy and ancient scripts, to suggest a lost language of the land—a script that chronicles the interplay between the natural world and the human impulse to record, interpret, and reimagine. The symbolism of extinct plants in Balzhieva’s work stems from her personal experience with the Buryat language—an experience marked by loss, and by an effort to grasp and preserve it.

 

Combining research, humour, and critical inquiry, Slavs and Tatars examine the cultural and linguistic complexities of the Eurasian region. By engaging popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, and academic scholarship, they open up new paths for contemporary discourse.

 

A sculpture of a tongue stretched into the splits, Szpagat (2017), captures the contradictions of language—how it can connect and confuse, reveal and distort, all at once.

 

In Kitab Kebab (2014), a traditional kebab skewer pierces a stack of the collective’s chosen books. This playful installation reflects on our relationship with reading—intellectual and emotional alike—suggesting that knowledge is not merely absorbed, but digested.

 

Love Letters (2014) is a series that explores language as a source of political, metaphysical, and even sexual emancipation. Drawing on caricature—echoing the style of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s illustrations—the carpets portray the wrenching experience of having a foreign alphabet imposed on a native tongue, and the linguistic acrobatics required to navigate such a shift. The casualties of these linguistic takeovers—lost letters and mistranslations—take centre stage, standing as markers of the traumas of modernity.

 

Through the subversive power of words, the reclaiming of overwritten scripts, performative gestures of writing, alternative approaches to reading, and speculative symbolic systems, the works presented in the exhibition offer tacit strategies for resisting erasure and epistemic violence, while also enacting other ways of knowing and being.

—Timur Zolotoev, curator