At TROEF, the project focuses on the borderland as a space where different histories, experiences, and political forces converge, and from which phenomena emerge.
Border Vernacular
Artists
- Darya Akhrameika
- Danute Līva
- Emma Ajdari
Curator
- Céleste van Berkum
Graphic design
- Vita Kiewiet de Jonge
On show from 23.10.2026 to 13.12.2026
The exhibition is also a site-specific response to Leiden’s heritage of Oriental knowledge production, shaped by its long-standing traditions of Asian studies, ethnographic museums, archives and botanical gardens, which grounds collecting, classifying, knowing and appreciating "the Orient".
Danute Līva (1998, Latvia) is an artistic researcher whose practice engages with space and materials through research, fieldwork, writing, and making. She’s intrigued by spaces that have been affected by external factors – such as governmental decisions and large engineering projects – and how they influence communities, culture and environment. These factors are investigated through fieldwork: spending time with locals, visiting industrial sites or refugees’ graveyards, forming a base for an essay or physical outcome. With her work, she attempts to counter dominant narratives and work with marginalised voices.
She has been part of the artistic research network Baltic Lines, which explores the Rail Baltica megaproject. Danute has participated in several group exhibitions, held one solo exhibition, and works as an editor for Failed Architecture, a spatial criticism online magazine.
DARYA AKHRAMEIKA
Darya Akhrameika (1997, Belarus) is a spatial designer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice is a spatial storytelling: researching the stories hidden in built environments and tracing how political or cultural shifts imprint themselves on everyday spaces. She translates these findings into illustrations, small architectural forms, scenography and immersive experiences.
Alongside her independent practice, she works as a spatial designer for cultural spaces, exhibitions, museums and public art projects. She has collaborated with artists and designers including Gabriel Lester and Richard Niessen, and has worked on projects ranging from exhibition scenography to public-space installations. She currently works independently on several projects, including a research project on the relationship between architecture and politics in Antarctica.
The works in the exhibition emphasise the relational character of the border. The vernacular window connects those who lived there in the past with those who live there now, and simultaneously shows how the expanding military structures divide the population. The scale models bring migrants and local residents into relation, while the punitive and restrictive structures reveal the relationship between the state and the land. The church towers point towards the relationships between the populations themselves.
These relations are not imposed upon an otherwise neutral landscape. They emerge from the land and from the human activities that have taken place upon it.
Emma Ajdari is a writer, artistic researcher, filmmaker and former paralegal aid. Her practice interrogates migration and mobility structures - specifically their representational logics, algorithmic materialities, and structurally obstructed political relations. Central to this is an investigation into the unclean desires, anxieties, and defenses surrounding the abject: its aestheticization, its feminization, and the ways in which all these formations translate into a border, reality principle, and symbolic economy that sustains and naturalizes racist logic. Her research comprises a combination of film, TV, theory, performance, and experimental writing – currently exploring the relation between Law, popular entertainment, and serialization with her experimental legal drama Fax & Circumstances. Emma has a background in critical studies, philosophy and migration law. She is co-curator in the art-theory collective Apophenia and nightlife collective Jooon.
The landscape carries and absorbs everything. The river is constantly changing; the land is transformed by those who live on it, pass through it, or control it from a distance. Beneath all these phenomena, everything eventually returns to the ground: the ruined synagogue and the unmarked graves of migrants slowly fade into the landscape, surviving only in memory.
Emma Ajdari’s interventions bring this changing borderland into the present. Focusing on a different element each time, they alter the spatial and perceptual conditions of the exhibition. As a result, the space itself remains in flux: each visitor encounters a different configuration of relations.
Find all the upcoming events around Border Vernacular in the agenda.
Border Vernacular is on show from 23.10.2026 to 13.12.2026. Many gratitudes to the artists for being part of this exhibition.