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.

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.



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