Slavs and Tatars

Defining an area "east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China" as their remit, Slavs and Tatars repeatedly creolize, craft and collide a political and imagined geography to topple our brittle notions of identity, language, and beliefs. Throughout their ten-year practice, the artists have turned to Turkic language politics, medieval advice literature, the relationship between Iran and Poland, and transliteration, to name but a few of their areas of research. A region sandwiched between empires (Russian, Byzantine, Persian, to name a few), ideologies (Communism and political Islam), not to mention the Abrahamic faiths, Eurasia becomes a foil to an understanding of ourselves as multiple subjectivities. The artists' work - from sculptures to lecture performances, installations to publications - similarly overturn the traditional hierarchies of understanding, seeing, and listening. Slavs and Tatars are keen to free knowledge from the Enlightenment confines of the mind. Their "Kitab Kebab" series offers a digestive approach to reading as opposed to the strictly analytical. A sculpture often leads to a book to be read on a carpet that drops us off at the feet of an old man riding backwards on his donkey.