I am a Volga Tatar visual artist, filmmaker, and convener based in Oslo, navigating cross-colonial realities and possible scenarios for their reparative pasts and futures. I work between (moving) image-making, multilingual writing, listening, and archiving. I am particularly interested in how the gaze is produced, represented, and historicized within documentary contexts; and how documentary practices can acquire a spiritual dimension.
Recent exhibitions include Communicating Difficult Pasts, Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn, 2024; Real Realities for Real, Vermillion Sands, Copenhagen, 2024; As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, 2023; Sisterløs, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, 2023; Lumbung Cinema Program, documenta 15, 2022. I am about to finish my PhD in Artistic Research titled Colonial Mәdness: Feminist-Indigenous Cosmologies at the Trondheim Art Academy, NTNU.
"Munajats of Mähirä," two-channel video installation, 2024, 18 min
The essay film Munajats of Mähirä, a melodic reflection on the life and legacy of my great-grandmother Mähirä, situates Tatarstan, an indigenous Muslim republic in so-called Russia, through all of the colonial formations that our land has been a part of: Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Russian Federation. In this video portal, I am channeling intergenerational and translocal motherhood, assembling the bodies and memories of the women of my family through the means of editing archival and new video material, exposing textiles and healing rituals. The leitmotif of the film are the munajats, Tatar spiritual chants that were handed down by my great-grandmother as an immaterial legacy that provides an opportunity to touch and acknowledge the reality of those who are no longer with us but forever within. Featuring English, Tatar, Russian, and Norwegian languages, Munajats of Mähirä recounts fate, belief, and loss, layering tradition with a contemporary feminist interpretation of it, narrated from a great-grandmother to a great-granddaughter, across colonial, linguistic, cultural, and temporal contexts they belong to.
Commissioned by Tallinn Art Hall, for the exhibition Communicating Difficult Pasts, curated by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astakhovska; Supported by OCA - Office for Contemporary Arts Norway
"The Voice of Söembikä," two-channel video installation, 2022/2024
What’s in a name? Yaniya Mikhalina’s 2-channel video installation The Voice of Söembikä (2022/2024), centres the legend of Söembikä, the last female ruler of the Qazan Khanate and a national Tatar figure of resistance. According to the tale, Söembikä leapt from a tower to avoid a forced marriage to the Muscovite Tsar Ivan the Terrible following his conquest of her kingdom and forced Christianization of her people. In Mikhalina’s work, historical, linguistic, mythical, and personal narratives surrounding the Tatar nameSöembikä unfold.
In the first video, six women of varying ages, all named Söembikä, are singing a historical song – a so-called beyit – about their legendary namesake in the Tatar language. This beyit is sung in the first person and in the present tense, rendering the act of singing a it a veritable source of feminist and decolonial history. With differing proficiencies in their native tongue, the singers’ accents also become an important component of the performance, whereby Söembikä’s existence is asserted not as discrete entity but as multiplicity. The second video references the myth of Söembikä’s final act by depicting a dress being cast from the tower that now bears her name. The perpetual falling orchestrated by the looping of the video disjoints any notion of stability and points to how the historical unconscious does not exist in- and of-itself but unfolds through each singular engagement with the story of Söembikä. While Söembikä falls out of nothingness, from an imaginary that occludes her historical existence, the chorus of Söembikäs affirms her actuality and presence. — Karin Bähler Lavér
"Appeal to All Western Countries," sound piece, 14 min, 2024
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 in a very emotional language, has never reached the international agenda and was silently stored in the Blinken archives in Budapest for almost 50 years, until I found it by pure chance earlier this year. 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, echoing the recent twists of colonial legislation.
This work is a deeply collaborative effort in carving out the collective presence, convened alongside people of four generations and many sensitivities. I have invited contemporary Tatar and Bashqort language activists to re-enact the original letter that has been translated from Russian to Tatar, Bashqort, and English. Mansur Möhammätshin, Zilya Biqtimerova, Ziliä Qansurá, Tansulpan Buraqaeva, Çiksezlek, Deenar, allapopp, Dinara Rasul(eva) generously shared their voices and exposed different positions within their mother tongue. A self-sufficient sonority of the native languages, a form of history in itself, is blended with an effort to imagine a Tatar-Bashqort soundscape.
The labor of contextualization stands as an important tool of recovering the past and opening a possibility of imagining a rooted future. Bashqort filmmaker Tansulpan Buraqaeva, in a spirit of indigenous indifference to the compartmentalization of knowledge, has been both the translator, musician and one of the recorded voices in the project. The work is accompanied by a text of a Tatar researcher Leisan Garif that gives an insight into the history of colonial education politics on the Volga-Ural land. The humor, spiritual support and persistence of Masha Sarycheva, a co-curator of this project and a dear friend, made this community come true. Last but not least, the thoughtful sound design by sound artist Omar Itani took place in Lebanon, Beirut, thorn by continuous attacks by the Zionist entity. Necessarily translocal, this collaboration calls for urgent and simultaneous recognition of other than capitalist-colonial logic worldwide.
"Sisterless," documentary film, 59 min., 2022
Albina was a young Tatar woman who dreamed to become a psychoanalyst. Instead, she went through several episodes of psychosis and psychiatric hospitalizations herself, following the psychosis of her sister Almira, who committed suicide after the start of this project.
"Sisterless" is an unsentimental attempt to present the psychic reality of Albina and to analyze the work of grief; a feminist commentary on the connection between sickness, the contemporary political condition, and the consequences of the Post-Soviet displacement.
The narration is based on conversations accumulated over 1.5 years and provides a sex- and class-conscious take on the psychiatric system in Russia experienced by an woman who lost her mother tongue, inter-generational indigenous traumas, embodied capitalism, and female ethics. In the film, the genre of documentary is introduced as a way to flatten the hierarchy between the reality of delirium and the reality of facts; as a standpoint that simply allows relationships to take place and antagonisms to be revealed.
Several months after the full-scale invasion of Russia to Ukraine, after the final edit of the film, Albina committed suicide.
"Comrades, How Long will You Torment Us?," VHS installation, 29 min, 2022
A letter to the catastrophic present from 30 years ago, at once a very similar and very different moment in the history of Russia, made from the material of the independent TV program called Publicity Booth (1991-1993) which traveled around Post-Soviet territories, so people could share what they think about current state of politics. It is an important document on Russian colonialism seen not from its historical “beginning," different for every nation, but from the moment of transition from Soviet to Russian identity told by those who didn't exactly fit.
"The Struggle Starts with a Struggle of the Tongue: the Affective Dictionary of Tatar," Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (with Joen Vedel), 2022
The publication The Affective Dictionary of Tatar has resulted from a sound installation at the Kassel train station developed over the 100 days of the documenta 15, where my partner Joan Vedel daily learned a new phrase in Tatar from my grandmothers. The selected words and phrases were chosen for their usefulness, political relevance, poetic qualities and particularities to Tatar culture, offering to treat language as a history map and the biggest anti-colonial gift. Situated between a syllabus, a glossary, and the documentation of a process of learning a language of the beloved, The Struggle Starts with a Struggle of the Tongue: the Affective Dictionary of Tatar aims at tracing Tatar in different co-existing logic peculiar to the language and ultimately contemporary Tatar subjectivity: from the acoustic images in the words to particular grammatical forms, and from personal anecdotes to folk wisdom. We call it ‘an affective dictionary’, as it deals first and foremost with relationships and uses affection as a methodology. Unlike most other dictionaries, the affective dictionary doesn’t stem from the desire for an objective and comprehensive list of words and phrases; rather, it highlights language as something beyond a mere tool for communication and the production of meaning. It speaks to the ongoing process of unlearning and undoing of the colonial-patriarchal knowledge structures that prevail; language not as something human beings have but something human beings are.
"In the Volga-Ural Sky," a 2-channel vertical video installation, 20 min., 2022
In In the Volga-Ural Sky, a 2-channel vertical video installation, I am juxtaposing Soviet avant-garde footage and indigenous amateur videos. The goal of using avant-garde videos is not to re-edit them and change their meaning. Nor am I repurposing them to create something new. Rather, the desire to work with existing material comes from understanding that I cannot pretend that something has never existed before or has never been represented and thus realized. We always start from somewhere. Even if we don’t allow this thought to enter our consciousness, it exists in our unconscious.
The desire to work with leftovers is a recognition that there is always a context that came before and a necessity to address it. The concept of overwriting appears in Freud’s text “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad” where he compares human memory to a writing pad that consists of two layers. Writing on the second layer leaves barely visible traces on the first; even when we erase the message from the second layer, the residue remains on the first. That’s how the relationship between the visual and non-visual parts of the image-making is maintained. For example, while editing In the Volga-Ural Sky, I kept thinking about a story of how my mother cried when she learned, at around age four, that Lenin was not Tatar.
Thanks for the perseverance! For screening links, CV, full portfolio and other inquiries, please reach out via yaniyamikhalina@gmail.com
Credits:
yaniya mikhalina