Natalia Papaeva is a performance artist from Buryatia, Siberia. Based in Rotterdam, she was the recipient of the TENT Academy Awards in 2018 for the work ‘Yokhor’. Reflecting on her practice, she has written: ‘I’m not a Russian artist. Russia is a big country and Russians come in different shapes and colours. I appear Asian while I have a very Slavic name. My main focus is my voice and frustrations. For example, my biggest frustration is my mother tongue, which is an endangered language. Every day, I feel my language is fading away. My other frustration is that my family can’t rent a proper house in Moscow because they are Asian. Most of the landlords in Moscow look exclusively for slavic people. It upsets me that I cannot live in Siberia as I’d have no opportunities there. So I have to express my loneliness and anger here, abroad. I find it very fascinating to develop my personal stories in such a way that they become bigger than myself.’

Based in Rotterdam, Natalia is a performance artist and a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.