2025-08-27 | Razia Barsatie: in Manifestation #52: To Be Determined at Buro Stedelijk

Our fellow Razia Barsatie, together with artist Sarojini Lewis, as an artist duo, are participating in Manifestation #52: To Be Determined, starting August 28, at Buro Stedelijk.

Labyrinth Within is an ongoing collaboration between Razia and Sarojini, exploring their shared yet distinct experiences as women of Indo-Caribbean descent. Through sound recordings, family archives, and personal reflections, they navigate the complex layers of cultural identity shaped by their different relationships to this heritage.

Razia’s ‘traditional’ Hindustani upbringing in Suriname contrasted with Sarojini’s experience in the Netherlands, where cultural assimilation meant her mother’s Sarnami language was not transmitted. Their practice reflects on how migration, assimilation, and gender have shaped intergenerational memory, examining both inherited and lived traumas while navigating cultural boundaries in their current relationships.

Buro Stedelijk welcomes the process out of the studio, into the project space. We occupy the space and observe what the interaction with the space could offer. We explore artistic interventions in the semi-public space.

Often, exhibiting an artwork means freezing it in time. The work leaves the studio and is shown in a different setting. We defrost the artwork and let it develop in the project space.

The start of this manifestation will not be a composed arrangement, but the beginning of an ongoing process. Dion, Thato, Razia and Sarojini work on and present their work as it lives, breathes and develops. Observing, shuffling, remixing, rehearsing and resting. They might add or remove along the way and experience what grows and what dies in these spaces. We collaboratively investigate the in-between space of artistic production and institutional presentation. At specific moments the artists organize moments to talk about or engage the public with their projects and process.

More information here