Natalia Papaeva

Biography
Natalia Papaeva (b. 1989) is an artist born in Buryatia, Siberia, and based in Hilversum. Working across language, performance, video, drawing, and immersive installation, her practice brings together personal memory, embodied knowledge, and political realities, and is shaped by experiences of cultural and linguistic displacement. Reflecting on the ongoing impact of colonial histories on Indigenous languages and ways of being, she resists fixed or ethnographic framings of culture and approaches identity as dynamic and constantly transforming. In her work, language extends beyond words into gesture, rhythm, and image. Often beginning with remembered, inherited, or imagined texts, her works create spaces where multiple languages coexist and meaning remains fluid, exploring belonging as something continually constructed, felt as much as it is understood.

Residency project
At La Becque, Natalia Papaeva will develop a series of lecture-performances examining how education can function as a colonial tool. Taking as a starting point a Russified Buryat language textbook containing ideological imagery and linguistic distortions, she will transform the book into performance. Assuming the role of a rebellious teacher and storyteller, Papaeva uses voice, storytelling, and singing to reveal how knowledge has been constructed and transmitted through colonial education. During the residency, she will develop new performative lectures and record voice-based sound material, reclaiming language learning as a creative and collective act of resistance.