Motherland
Embroidery, 3D model, text, 2022
The project began with Victoria Sarangova's desire to reconstruct her family history after her mother's death. Her mother Nadezhda Sarangova was born in Siberia, where her family was exiled during the deportations simply for being Kalmyk. Unable to ask her mother directly, Victoria visited the website of Memorial, the main human rights organization collecting data about repression under Stalin, and found biographies of 194 repressed Kalmyks with the same surname, which in Kalmyk means Moon or Monday.
Even though more than five million people faced repression under Stalin's rule, it is practically forbidden to discuss this subject in russia. Memorial has recently been banned by the state, and many independent researchers were imprisoned based on fabricated cases. Meanwhile, the repression of the Kalmyk people under the codename "Operation Ulusy" should be recognized as genocide. The entire population was deported from their native lands to Siberia in December 1943 and up to 20 percent of the Kalmyk population was killed.
Embroidering the stories of repressed Kalmyks in the form of traditional Buddhist flags while spending time thinking of them, Victoria Sarangova commemorates the trauma of the whole nation as well as her personal loss and invites the audience to ioin her in this practice. After the exhibition, she plans to place the installation in the Kalmykian steppe in the form of a Mongolian ovoo - a divine space for gatherings and collective grieving.
Text by FATA collective.
Part of: Өмә ([ome]; Bashqort for "collective self-help practices")
nGbK work group: FATA collective
A project of nGbK in cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.
