Welcome to the artist publication launch and final presentation of Yaniya Mikhalina’s artistic doctoral project 'Colonial Mәdness: Feminist-Indigenous Cosmologies'. The event is in the Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Loft.
Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Loft
30 January 2025, 17.00–19.00
Welcome to the artist publication launch and final presentation of Yaniya Mikhalina’s artistic doctoral project Colonial Mәdness: Feminist-Indigenous Cosmologies. Mikhalina will present her artist publication in conversation with curator Karin Bähler Lavér.
The publication features contributions by Alfrid Bustanov, Anna Belchikova, Desirée Simões, Hilde Skancke Pedersen, Joana Monbaron, Lidiia Griaznova, Samira Makki, and Yaniya Mikhalina.
A selection of visual works will also be available in the space, including Mikhalina’s film Munajats of Mähirä and a sculptural version Sisterless.
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About the project
This research project positions itself at the crossroads of different colonial realities and their psychic worlds. Through the means of editing, listening, overwriting, and historizing documentary material of various origin, the project aims to create a space where indigenous and feminist worlds can confront the extraction from the ecosystems and cosmologies they voluntarily and involuntarily belong to.
From the juxtaposition of indigenous family archives with avant-garde colonial fantasies to the cinematic re-imagining of subjective experiences of delirium and forms of healing, the project spans various strategies and layers of image-making in relation to the globalitarian colonial regime, addressing the politics of the gaze.
Colonial Mәdness is Mikhalina’s earnest attempt to de-individualize what has been deemed mad and to acknowledge the right for madness as a river mouth for projections of unfit systems of knowledge-production. Stretching from the post-Soviet condition to the Volga-Ural land, from Sápmi to Brazil, this project aims to dignify and historicize states, conditions, and relationships to a territory reduced to being sick, occult, delirious, incurable, secondary or simply irrelevant.
Yaniya Mikhalina, Munajats of Mähirä (2024), film still. Image courtesy of the artist.
Yaniya Mikhalina, Pıyala, (2024), film still. Image courtesy of the artist.
About Yaniya Mikhalina
Yaniya Mikhalina is a Volga Tatar research-based artist and educator based in Oslo, navigating postcolonial realities, its difficult pasts, and possible scenarios for reparative futures. Mikhalina works across disciplines, mainly with (moving) image, sound, archive, and non-exemplary material heritage. She is particularly interested in how the gaze is produced, represented, and historicized within documentary contexts. Her recent exhibitions include the solo show Sisterless at Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2023) and Real Realities for Real (with Isabella Solar Villaseca) curated by Karin Bähler Lavérduo Vermillion Sands (2024); as well as the group exhibitions Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds at The Tallinn Art Hall Foundation (2024), As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories – Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2023), and documenta 15 Lumbung Film program (2022). The event at Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Loft is Mikhalina’s final presentation completing a PhD in Artistic Research at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art / Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
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Access
Please note that Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Loft is on the 4th floor, and regrettably not accessible for people with limited mobility. A long-term rehabilitation of the building is in process. We will do our best to accommodate accessibility and other needs – if you feel comfortable sharing them, or have any questions about accessibility and/or this event, please get in touch via e-mail with Project Manager Anne Marte Archer.