Polemične, multimedijske, zaumne priče o euroazijskim transrazumnim identitetima - satiričnim narodima koji su još više nego od drugih, bježali od samih sebe. Jezici, značenja i slike preklapaju se kako bi stvorili komunislam (komunizam + islam), globalni ideološki sustav za kidnapiranje planina.
www.slavsandtatars.com/
Slavs and Tatars: Reverse Joy / Tersten Neşe na Vimeu
For the Birds
by
In Beyonsense, Eurasian artist collective
Slavs and Tatars channels its inner Zaum in a celebration of the twists
of language across cultures, histories, and geographies.
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of the artists.
“Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”
—Pablo Picasso
In Victory over the Sun, men from the future appear from out of nowhere and drag the bourgeois sun kicking and screaming from the sky, stuff it into a box, and replace it with a new energy source more appropriate for the times. A character called The Traveler Through Time declares that the future will be masculine and that all people will look happy, although happiness itself will no longer exist. Finally, an airplane crashes into the stage.
In 1913, the debut performance of this first Russian Futurist opera in St. Petersburg didn’t go over so well. Maybe it was Alexei Kruchenykh’s “nonsensical” libretto or Mikhail Matiushin’s chaotic music or the outlandish costumes and stage sets designed by Kazimir Malevich—or maybe the audience just didn’t expect a plane to crash into the stage. Whatever the case, they reacted violently. To be fair, Kruchenykh wrote much of the libretto in Zaum, an experimental, non-referential language he developed with fellow poet Velimir Khlebnikov, in which Russian was broken down into its fundamental sounds, the words stripped of meaning to expose the primal Slavic essence of the sounds themselves.
Kruchenykh himself described the new language as “wild paradise, fiery languages, blazing coal.” Khlebnikov, who contributed a prologue to the opera, called it the “language of the birds.” It’s no wonder members of the audience reacted as they did. Robbed of familiar contextual cues and cozy linguistic references, it was as though they too had been stuck in a box and pronounced dead alongside the bourgeois sun.
One hundred years later, audiences are still trying to make sense of Zaum, but if it continues to evade understanding, it is because by its nature Zaum resists translation. There are no word-to-word correlations. It doesn’t make sense, it is trans sense, beyond sense. Not caged by culture and geography, meaning surfaces from within the depths of a primordial forest of sounds, briefly flits about, then returns to the cacophony of its murky woods. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”
Slavs and Tatars. Mother Tongues and Father Throats. 2012. Digital print. Photo courtesy the artists.
And this is what visitors to the Museum of Modern Art are grappling with today. With Beyonsense, which runs through December 10, 2012, the museum presents the first U.S. solo exhibition by the Eurasian artists collective Slavs and Tatars. Developed, in part, from their study of the museum’s collection of more than 1,000 Russian avant-garde illustrated books, the group designed an unconventional reading room—a so-called “room of reversals”—to feature text pieces and artist’s books that incorporate the Farsi, Russian, English, and Hebrew languages and scripts as a “celebration of twists of language across cultures, histories, and geographies.” The installation focuses on the letters ח (Hebrew), Х (Cyrillic), and خ (Arabic)—three characters united by the single closed vocal sound emanating from the back of the throat that all of them represent.
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Today, however, visitors get a chance to ease into Zaum. The quiet space created by Slavs and Tatars is a far cry from the confrontational 1913 production in St. Petersburg where audiences first reacted to the linguistic taunts from the Futurists. The small room within MoMA is an intimate and gently playful environment within the otherwise bustling museum setting, one more conducive to interacting with language experiments, as opposed to merely reacting to them. Visitors are invited to leave the museum—and New York City—behind, all the better to thoughtfully engage with the experiments themselves.
Acting as a kind of curated vestibule, the front area contains objects grounded in the group‘s literary and cultural interests, including a stack of books joined by a shish kebab skewer and a crown of braided wheat. Passing through hanging Persian carpets, which dampen any external museum noises, visitors enter a darkened, contemplative space featuring text pieces and printed publications. Suspended like a skylight at the center of the room, a light fixture inspired by a work that the American artist Dan Flavin made for a New York City mosque in the ’70s offers a soft glow. Below that, a fountain circulates a red liquid, alternately described by visitors as blood or Kool-Aid, in a small basin. Finally a selection of the group’s books, including the most recent title, Khhhhhhh—an approximation of the sound created by the installation’s three featured linguistic characters—is available on benches along the walls of the space.
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of Jason Mandella.
With members active in Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the
Middle East—where populations and languages are all in transition—Slavs
and Tatars plays with cultural registers and humorously blends academic
tropes with pop vernacular. Beyonsense addresses the
potential of language from its mystical perspective, to “both clarify
and complicate” communication across cultures and geographies. According
to the collective, “We imagine that language is always revelatory, but
it can hide as many meanings as it can reveal or divulge.”
Why not try to understand the song of a bird?
Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars—whose members asked to remain anonymous for this article, citing safety concerns and a desire to subsume its individuals to a collective spirit—dedicate its socio-historical explorations to Eurasia, an ambiguous region the artists define as "east of the former Berlin wall and west of the Great Wall of China." On view through Dec. 10, the exhibition provokes interpretations as shifting and ambiguous as the transcontinental region it explores. That ambiguity begins with the exhibition title, a translation of the term zaum—a concept introduced by early 20th Century Russian Futurist poets to describe their experiments in deconstructing language and meaning, alternatively translated as "transreason." (It is also, as the group has noted, a wink to Beyoncé Knowles.)
The work on view is emphatically textual,
exploiting tensions between accepted history and counter-narrative,
linguistic atavism and poetic disruption. Kitab Kebab (2012)
(literally, "Book Kebab"), is a sculpture that involves several books on
religion, philosophy and language, skewered with a flat, pointed metal
shaft, like meat on a skewer, or a sword.
In The Dear for The Dear (2012), we see a brown, shriveled cucumber atop a rahlé—a small lectern used to hold an open holy book. An artist with the collective cites an Egyptian proverb to illuminate the latter: "Life is like a cucumber," the proverb goes. "One day in your hand, one in your ass." The image is irresistibly repulsive, begging psychosexual and scatological interpretation. Why is the cucumber shriveled and brown? The artist cannot or will not say, except to note that it was carved from wood.
The physical and conceptual heart of the exhibition is the title installation, Beyonsense (2012), a calm, black-lit reading room, insulated from sound and light by dozens of hanging rugs, filled with several other mixed-media pieces. Inside, the group's myriad textual offerings lie scattered atop benches on either side in an array of languages and scripts. From the ceiling hangs an homage in green neon to an installation by Dan Flavin, commissioned in 1982 for a Sufi mosque in lower Manhattan. Slavs and Tatars were attracted to the original in part because of the "cognitive dissonance" it created, the artist said.
"Flavin is somebody whom we would consider kind of secular and minimalist," he added. "But at the same time, what's more spiritual than light sculptures?"
At the far end of the reading room, a screen-printed mirror, entitled Kh Giveth (2012), references an Arabic letter that serves as an "anti-imperial phoneme," the artist says, "because it's the one phoneme that Anglo-Saxons sort of have a difficult time pronouncing because it doesn't really exist." Beside it, another painted mirror, Kh Taketh Away (2012), locates difficult phonemes on a map of the throat and tongue, a space of tension between breath and glottal restriction. The phonemes, as such, become "an oppositional gesture," as the artist put it.
Gurgling placidly at the center, a fountain spews red liquid, which appears pink or black in places because of the unconventional lighting. Reverse Joy (2012) is a smaller version of a fountain installed by the group in Jerusalem, itself modeled after a fountain in Tehran's Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, hose water was briefly dyed red in the 1980s to commemorate the martyrs of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.
Despite its heavy moral and political allusions, the fountain provokes diverging reactions among spectators, the unnamed artist insists: Children who observed its larger iteration in Jerusalem, for example, often interpreted the red liquid as Kool-Aid, not blood. "It's really naïve and kind of festive on one side and, on the other end, it's, of course, extremely violent and politically manipulative—it's about blood and martyrdom," he says.
"It occupies two opposite ends of the spectrum at the same time," he added. "And that's what's quite interesting for us."
Of the texts and objects that make up the show, one might appropriately ask a question posed by several characters in The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie-another artist who nimbly, if perilously, straddles the shifting, uneasy territory where Europe meets Asia: "What kind of an idea are you?"
If the work could speak, it might reply as one of Rushdie's characters did: "What kind of an idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive."
Interview with Slavs and Tatars
"Beginning with the collective’s name, everything related to Slavs
and Tatars is about building connections between seemingly disparate
subjects—whether places, histories or ideologies." [2] From the outset, print media has played a significant role in their work: namely, the Slavs Poster (2005) and the Nations
(2007) series, with such quirky aphorisms as 'Men are from Murmansk,
Women are from Vilnius' and 'Nice Tan, Turkmenistan!' exhibited at the
2nd Moscow Biennale and 10th anniversary of legendary Parisian Colette (boutique)[3].
The medium of print offered the group the opportunity to distribute
delicately produced polemics and ephemera to a relatively wide audience,
such as the Drafting Defeat:10th Century Roadmaps, 21st century Disasters, a series of 10th century maps of the Middle East by Al-Istakhri[4]. "Language is at the heart of [their] practice"[5]
as is a brutal sense of humour and a suspicion of positivist thought
and of modernization as a guise for westernization. Their work "attempts
to reclaim history by retelling it, and primarily through the
perspective of the defeated, as opposed to the victors."[6]
In 2009, Slavs and Tatars published Kidnapping Mountains with London-based Book Works: "a playful and informative exploration of the muscular stories, wills, and defeat inhabiting the Caucasus region"[7]. The book coincided with the exhibit of the same name at the Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art
in Aalst, Belgium.
Slavs and Tatars' work often takes place in the public sphere: via
public space, institutions or media. They have repeatedly collaborated
with and been featured in 032c, the bi-annual culture publication from Berlin. Their year long project 79.89.09
looked at two key dates–the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the fall of
Communism in 1989–to better understand the historic year of 2009. 79.89.09 was exemplary of the multidisciplinary work of the group: consisting of a lecture series, a print edition, a mirror mosaic Resist Resisting God
as well as a feature in two consecutive issues (17 and 18 respectively) of the Berlin-based culture magazine 032c.[8]
The 79.89.09 lecture series has been presented at the Rietveld
Academy's Studium Generale in Amsterdam, Triumph Gallery, Moscow, the
Dutch Art Institute, the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University as part of the Edifying
series of performative lectures, and the Nordic Embassies in Berlin as part of Correct Me if I'm Critical
. For the 10th Sharjah Biennial,
the collective presented "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite
Showbiz", an elaboration on "79.89.09" which looked at the folklore and
crafts accompanying the ideological impulses of the end of Communism and
the beginning of revolutionary Islam.
Hymns of No Resistance–the group's first performance piece,
performed by a Kurdish quartet–consisted of four pop songs rewritten to
address geopolitical issues of identity, language, and territorial
disputes. Stealers Wheel' "Stuck in the Middle with you" became "Stuck in Ossetia with you" about the Georgia-Russia war of 2008 while Michael Sembello's "She's a Maniac" (from Fame) becomes "She's Armenian" about the Armenian diaspora.
For the Wola Art Festival
, in the historical Wola District in Warsaw, S&T created Idz na Wschod! (or Go East!):
a billboard featuring Charles Bronson (in fact from Lipka Tatar not
Mexican or Native American heritage) invites Warsaw's residents to defy
their parents and their government and head not west but rather east. A
full-day trip for 50+ people was organized to the Polish Tatar villages
of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany near the Bieolrussian border to visit the Polish Tatar mosques, cemeteries and a Tatar meal.[9] Idz na Wschod!
offered an alternative, more cosmopolitan reading of Polish national
identity, one unfortunately often considered homogeneous; as well as a
unique, progressive view of Islam, via the vernacular architecture and
customs of the Polish Tatars.
In early 2010, Slavs and Tatars published Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names with Onestar Press
:
a selection of 150 Eurasian cities whose names have been caught like
children in the spiteful back and forth of history's custody battle.
Some of the cities, i.e. Odessa, reveal a wholly Asian heritage in their
previous monikers (in this case, Hadjibey). Love Me, Love Me Not was also part of the The Past is a Foreign Country exhibition at the Center of Contemporary Art 'Znaki Czasu'
in Torún, Poland. The collective also participated in the Frieze Sculpture Park
in Regent's Park with their Monobrow Manifesto, a large inflatable featuring the faces of a monobrowed Middle Eastern man on one side and Bert (Sesame Street) on the other.
Their "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz" at the 10th
Sharjah Biennial offered shade in the form of colorfully, stitched
banners with creolized slogans from the Iranian Revolution and Poland's Solidarność
movement, such as "Help the Militia, Beat Yourself Up!" The
installation featured a rare "interaction of the traditional with the
political, the playful manipulations of language and patterns, and the
invitation for dialogue through the seduction of the space and the
rituals. The green space glowing with reflections of neon lights
flickering in the mirror mosaics offered an alternative space for
contemplation." [10]
The collective has worked on primarily three cycles of work: the first, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance); the second, on the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, 79.89.09, A Monobrow Manifesto) and their third and current cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic. This new body of work includes contributions to group exhibitions–Reverse Joy
at the GfZK
, Leipzig, PrayWay
at the New Museum's 2nd Triennial, "The Ungovernables
", and 7th Asia Pacific Triennial–as well as solo engagements with Not Moscow Not Mecca
at the Vienna Secession, Khhhhhhh
at Moravia Gallery, Brno and Beyonsense
at MoMA
as part of the museum's Projects series. Beyonsense, the collective's
first solo museum presentation in the U.S., features a black-lit reading
room as well as a reconstruction of a little-known Dan_Flavin work commissioned by the Dia_Art_Foundation for a Sufi mosque in New York's SoHo in the early 1980s.
Slavs and Tatars will participate in ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, which takes place September 7 – November 11th 2012 in Gwangju, Korea.
• Kidnapping Mountains
(2009, Book Works): on the Caucauses.
• Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names
(2010, JRP-Ringier). An inventory and mapping of the names of 150 cities across Eurasia.
• Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would've, could've, should've
(2011) on the legendary early 20th c Azeri political satire Molla_Nasraddin_(magazine) with Christoph Keller Editions editions. The book received favourable reviews from the international press, including The New Yorker
, Guardian
, Asian Review of Books
, and Turkish daily Radikal
.
Don J Cohen writes "[I]n the wonderfully reproduced color illustrations
in this book...a range of subject matter [is] presented: landlords and
peasants, marriage and class, women's rights and education, interethnic
group rivalries, the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires,
sacred and secular, Muslims and Christians. Editorial commentary and
translations of the actual captions from the five languages that appear
in the texts-Azeri Turkish, Russian, Farsi, Istanbulli Turkish and
Arabic-go part of the way to educate the reader; but many of the
subscribers to the magazine were illiterate. As intended, the pictures
tell the rest of the story most convincingly." [11]
• Not Moscow Not Mecca (2012, Revolver/Secession): the story
of syncretism and Central Asia’s particularly progressive approach to
Islam from the perspective of the region's fruits including The
Mulberry, The Watermelon, The Quince, and The Cucumber, among others.
The book includes an interview with the collective by Franz Thalmair,
critic and curator, as well as a chapter from Norman_O._Brown's Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991, University of California Press), a reading of the Qu'ran thru Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
• Khhhhhhh
(2012, Mousse/Moravian Gallery): through the perspective of single
phoneme [Kh] in Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic, Slavs and Tatars tell the
story of sacred or numinous language, Khlebnikov, hospitality, amongst
others.
SLAVS AND TATARS: Not Moscow Not Mecca
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of the artists.
“Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”
—Pablo Picasso
In Victory over the Sun, men from the future appear from out of nowhere and drag the bourgeois sun kicking and screaming from the sky, stuff it into a box, and replace it with a new energy source more appropriate for the times. A character called The Traveler Through Time declares that the future will be masculine and that all people will look happy, although happiness itself will no longer exist. Finally, an airplane crashes into the stage.
In 1913, the debut performance of this first Russian Futurist opera in St. Petersburg didn’t go over so well. Maybe it was Alexei Kruchenykh’s “nonsensical” libretto or Mikhail Matiushin’s chaotic music or the outlandish costumes and stage sets designed by Kazimir Malevich—or maybe the audience just didn’t expect a plane to crash into the stage. Whatever the case, they reacted violently. To be fair, Kruchenykh wrote much of the libretto in Zaum, an experimental, non-referential language he developed with fellow poet Velimir Khlebnikov, in which Russian was broken down into its fundamental sounds, the words stripped of meaning to expose the primal Slavic essence of the sounds themselves.
Kruchenykh himself described the new language as “wild paradise, fiery languages, blazing coal.” Khlebnikov, who contributed a prologue to the opera, called it the “language of the birds.” It’s no wonder members of the audience reacted as they did. Robbed of familiar contextual cues and cozy linguistic references, it was as though they too had been stuck in a box and pronounced dead alongside the bourgeois sun.
One hundred years later, audiences are still trying to make sense of Zaum, but if it continues to evade understanding, it is because by its nature Zaum resists translation. There are no word-to-word correlations. It doesn’t make sense, it is trans sense, beyond sense. Not caged by culture and geography, meaning surfaces from within the depths of a primordial forest of sounds, briefly flits about, then returns to the cacophony of its murky woods. In the words of Pablo Picasso, “Why not try to understand the song of a bird?”
Slavs and Tatars. Mother Tongues and Father Throats. 2012. Digital print. Photo courtesy the artists.
And this is what visitors to the Museum of Modern Art are grappling with today. With Beyonsense, which runs through December 10, 2012, the museum presents the first U.S. solo exhibition by the Eurasian artists collective Slavs and Tatars. Developed, in part, from their study of the museum’s collection of more than 1,000 Russian avant-garde illustrated books, the group designed an unconventional reading room—a so-called “room of reversals”—to feature text pieces and artist’s books that incorporate the Farsi, Russian, English, and Hebrew languages and scripts as a “celebration of twists of language across cultures, histories, and geographies.” The installation focuses on the letters ח (Hebrew), Х (Cyrillic), and خ (Arabic)—three characters united by the single closed vocal sound emanating from the back of the throat that all of them represent.
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Today, however, visitors get a chance to ease into Zaum. The quiet space created by Slavs and Tatars is a far cry from the confrontational 1913 production in St. Petersburg where audiences first reacted to the linguistic taunts from the Futurists. The small room within MoMA is an intimate and gently playful environment within the otherwise bustling museum setting, one more conducive to interacting with language experiments, as opposed to merely reacting to them. Visitors are invited to leave the museum—and New York City—behind, all the better to thoughtfully engage with the experiments themselves.
Acting as a kind of curated vestibule, the front area contains objects grounded in the group‘s literary and cultural interests, including a stack of books joined by a shish kebab skewer and a crown of braided wheat. Passing through hanging Persian carpets, which dampen any external museum noises, visitors enter a darkened, contemplative space featuring text pieces and printed publications. Suspended like a skylight at the center of the room, a light fixture inspired by a work that the American artist Dan Flavin made for a New York City mosque in the ’70s offers a soft glow. Below that, a fountain circulates a red liquid, alternately described by visitors as blood or Kool-Aid, in a small basin. Finally a selection of the group’s books, including the most recent title, Khhhhhhh—an approximation of the sound created by the installation’s three featured linguistic characters—is available on benches along the walls of the space.
Installation view of Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy of Jason Mandella.
Why not try to understand the song of a bird?
Slavs and Tatars Bring Eurasian Transreason to MoMA
"Beyonsense," the first US solo museum show by international artist collective Slavs and Tatars, at New York's Museum of Modern Art, thrives in the rich, unstable spaces where language, meaning and imagery overlap.Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars—whose members asked to remain anonymous for this article, citing safety concerns and a desire to subsume its individuals to a collective spirit—dedicate its socio-historical explorations to Eurasia, an ambiguous region the artists define as "east of the former Berlin wall and west of the Great Wall of China." On view through Dec. 10, the exhibition provokes interpretations as shifting and ambiguous as the transcontinental region it explores. That ambiguity begins with the exhibition title, a translation of the term zaum—a concept introduced by early 20th Century Russian Futurist poets to describe their experiments in deconstructing language and meaning, alternatively translated as "transreason." (It is also, as the group has noted, a wink to Beyoncé Knowles.)
View Slideshow
Slavs and Tatars. Gastham Nabood Nagard. 2011. Embroidered fabric. 78
3/4 x 47 1/4″ (200 x 120 cm). Image courtesy of The Third Line, Dubai;
Slavs and Tatars. Long Live The Syncretics. 2012. Painted steel. 145
11/16 x 74 13/16″ (370 x 190 cm). Image courtesy of The Third Line,
Dubai;
In The Dear for The Dear (2012), we see a brown, shriveled cucumber atop a rahlé—a small lectern used to hold an open holy book. An artist with the collective cites an Egyptian proverb to illuminate the latter: "Life is like a cucumber," the proverb goes. "One day in your hand, one in your ass." The image is irresistibly repulsive, begging psychosexual and scatological interpretation. Why is the cucumber shriveled and brown? The artist cannot or will not say, except to note that it was carved from wood.
The physical and conceptual heart of the exhibition is the title installation, Beyonsense (2012), a calm, black-lit reading room, insulated from sound and light by dozens of hanging rugs, filled with several other mixed-media pieces. Inside, the group's myriad textual offerings lie scattered atop benches on either side in an array of languages and scripts. From the ceiling hangs an homage in green neon to an installation by Dan Flavin, commissioned in 1982 for a Sufi mosque in lower Manhattan. Slavs and Tatars were attracted to the original in part because of the "cognitive dissonance" it created, the artist said.
"Flavin is somebody whom we would consider kind of secular and minimalist," he added. "But at the same time, what's more spiritual than light sculptures?"
At the far end of the reading room, a screen-printed mirror, entitled Kh Giveth (2012), references an Arabic letter that serves as an "anti-imperial phoneme," the artist says, "because it's the one phoneme that Anglo-Saxons sort of have a difficult time pronouncing because it doesn't really exist." Beside it, another painted mirror, Kh Taketh Away (2012), locates difficult phonemes on a map of the throat and tongue, a space of tension between breath and glottal restriction. The phonemes, as such, become "an oppositional gesture," as the artist put it.
Gurgling placidly at the center, a fountain spews red liquid, which appears pink or black in places because of the unconventional lighting. Reverse Joy (2012) is a smaller version of a fountain installed by the group in Jerusalem, itself modeled after a fountain in Tehran's Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, hose water was briefly dyed red in the 1980s to commemorate the martyrs of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.
Despite its heavy moral and political allusions, the fountain provokes diverging reactions among spectators, the unnamed artist insists: Children who observed its larger iteration in Jerusalem, for example, often interpreted the red liquid as Kool-Aid, not blood. "It's really naïve and kind of festive on one side and, on the other end, it's, of course, extremely violent and politically manipulative—it's about blood and martyrdom," he says.
"It occupies two opposite ends of the spectrum at the same time," he added. "And that's what's quite interesting for us."
Of the texts and objects that make up the show, one might appropriately ask a question posed by several characters in The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie-another artist who nimbly, if perilously, straddles the shifting, uneasy territory where Europe meets Asia: "What kind of an idea are you?"
If the work could speak, it might reply as one of Rushdie's characters did: "What kind of an idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive."
Slavs and Tatars’s “Too Much Tłumacz”
In 1983, Czech writer Milan Kundera defined Central Europe as those
states that historically and culturally belonged to the West, but had
been politically assigned to the Eastern Bloc in the geopolitical
wrangling of the Cold War. His notable essay “The Stolen West” (1983)
accentuated the shared cultural heritage of the countries on both sides
of the Iron Curtain and held a strategic value in defying communism.
Today, over two decades after the fall of Berlin Wall and almost a
decade after the European Union’s border shifted eastward, such
designations sound woefully outdated. Yet the artistic collective Slavs
and Tatars locate their geographical interest “east of the former Berlin
Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” Their first solo show in
Warsaw is dedicated to linguistic complexities and what is lost (or
gained) in translation. But what strategies lurk behind their approach?
In the center of the gallery stands a peculiar structure made of wood, a takhit, a type of furniture found in tea houses, kiosks, or restaurants across Central Asia. It resembles a bed, but lacks a mattress or upholstery and is covered instead with patterned rugs. Here it acts as a reading platform, with Slavs and Tatars’s publications placed casually on it. In their practice takhits, tent-like tea salons, small shrines, or flying carpets (like PrayWay (2012) at the New Museum’s Triennial in New York this year) are meant to bring in an impression of public space, hospitality, and generosity.
But they’re less known for their lounges, I suppose, than for research that finds form through lectures, books, and various types of artifacts. Steeped in geographically specific humor, their works go against constructing a homogenous picture of the East, emphasizing rather the idiosyncrasies and curiosities. The superficial similarities they uncover lead to crackpot theories, bilingual puns, and pure absurdities. Take the globe Slavs and Tatars fashioned, for instance, in which the Earth is substituted with an enlarged quince. The word dunya is the Arabic and Turkish word for “world” which, in turn, sounds similar to dunja (quince) in Serbo-Croatian. (The work is meant to bury a hatchet between the Turks and Serbs.) The exhibition’s title “Too Much Tłumacz” includes a homophonic translation too. “Too much” sounds like the Polish word for “translator.” So the title, if you can read both languages, would read “too much translating.” In the work Dig the Booty (2012) the aphorism “Dig the booty of the monoglots, but marry, my child, a polyglot” is transliterated into Latin, Cyrillic and Farsi, in homage to the circuitous paths of Azeri language, which in the twentieth century went through three transliterations imposed by various authorities. Consequently, generations of Azeris speak the same language, but read books written in three different alphabets.
While the artists’ statement disapproves of the power of translation, they themselves employ it incessantly. The walls around the takhit are hung with rugs, carpets, and prints, all using texts (at least bilingual, if not more) contributing to an incomprehensible linguistic brew. In the adjacent room, large-scale mirrors are painted over with short paraphrases of idioms and titles of popular books, referring to the countries or cities of the regions Slavs and Tatars are interested in. Looking at my own reflection, I learned for instance that “Men are from Murmansk / Women are from Vilnius,” or “Once a Tease, Always a Kyrgyz.” Let’s call the whole thing off!
As most of the works in the show are remnants of previous larger projects of the collective, they all needed extended captions (which were, unfortunately, missing). While a globe-quince is funny, to reach the deeper meaning one needs to plow through the collective’s books on the takhit (in this case Not Moscow Not Mecca) or attend their lectures. While the research results in books, the artworks turn out to be merely its by-products. What remains is an aura of luring exoticism: Sinbad the Sailor meets accretions of unfathomable convoluted oriental writings.
In their project comparing Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the breakdown of communism in Poland in 1989 (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 2011), Slavs and Tatars delved even deeper into the past, referring to Sarmatism, a cultural formation in Baroque-era Poland, based on the conviction that Polish nobility descended from a long-lost Iranian tribe of the Black Sea, the Sarmatians. Supposedly, the Polish inherited their “national characteristics”—such as their love of freedom, hospitality, and courage—from them. But Slavs and Tatars themselves concoct similar myths. In Poland, their quixotic work serves almost as a reminder of these forgotten Eastern ties, served up as an exotic remnant proffering both wisdom and colorful decoration. In other words: intriguing—but also a little superficial.
The exhibition at Raster opened during Warsaw Gallery Weekend, which aimed to galvanize a fledgling Polish art market and bring it into the broader Western spectrum. Paradoxically, no artist or collective suits this goal better than Slavs and Tatars. But to escape the dense cobweb they spin, let’s quote the Gershwins: Potato, potahto!
In the center of the gallery stands a peculiar structure made of wood, a takhit, a type of furniture found in tea houses, kiosks, or restaurants across Central Asia. It resembles a bed, but lacks a mattress or upholstery and is covered instead with patterned rugs. Here it acts as a reading platform, with Slavs and Tatars’s publications placed casually on it. In their practice takhits, tent-like tea salons, small shrines, or flying carpets (like PrayWay (2012) at the New Museum’s Triennial in New York this year) are meant to bring in an impression of public space, hospitality, and generosity.
But they’re less known for their lounges, I suppose, than for research that finds form through lectures, books, and various types of artifacts. Steeped in geographically specific humor, their works go against constructing a homogenous picture of the East, emphasizing rather the idiosyncrasies and curiosities. The superficial similarities they uncover lead to crackpot theories, bilingual puns, and pure absurdities. Take the globe Slavs and Tatars fashioned, for instance, in which the Earth is substituted with an enlarged quince. The word dunya is the Arabic and Turkish word for “world” which, in turn, sounds similar to dunja (quince) in Serbo-Croatian. (The work is meant to bury a hatchet between the Turks and Serbs.) The exhibition’s title “Too Much Tłumacz” includes a homophonic translation too. “Too much” sounds like the Polish word for “translator.” So the title, if you can read both languages, would read “too much translating.” In the work Dig the Booty (2012) the aphorism “Dig the booty of the monoglots, but marry, my child, a polyglot” is transliterated into Latin, Cyrillic and Farsi, in homage to the circuitous paths of Azeri language, which in the twentieth century went through three transliterations imposed by various authorities. Consequently, generations of Azeris speak the same language, but read books written in three different alphabets.
While the artists’ statement disapproves of the power of translation, they themselves employ it incessantly. The walls around the takhit are hung with rugs, carpets, and prints, all using texts (at least bilingual, if not more) contributing to an incomprehensible linguistic brew. In the adjacent room, large-scale mirrors are painted over with short paraphrases of idioms and titles of popular books, referring to the countries or cities of the regions Slavs and Tatars are interested in. Looking at my own reflection, I learned for instance that “Men are from Murmansk / Women are from Vilnius,” or “Once a Tease, Always a Kyrgyz.” Let’s call the whole thing off!
As most of the works in the show are remnants of previous larger projects of the collective, they all needed extended captions (which were, unfortunately, missing). While a globe-quince is funny, to reach the deeper meaning one needs to plow through the collective’s books on the takhit (in this case Not Moscow Not Mecca) or attend their lectures. While the research results in books, the artworks turn out to be merely its by-products. What remains is an aura of luring exoticism: Sinbad the Sailor meets accretions of unfathomable convoluted oriental writings.
In their project comparing Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the breakdown of communism in Poland in 1989 (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, 2011), Slavs and Tatars delved even deeper into the past, referring to Sarmatism, a cultural formation in Baroque-era Poland, based on the conviction that Polish nobility descended from a long-lost Iranian tribe of the Black Sea, the Sarmatians. Supposedly, the Polish inherited their “national characteristics”—such as their love of freedom, hospitality, and courage—from them. But Slavs and Tatars themselves concoct similar myths. In Poland, their quixotic work serves almost as a reminder of these forgotten Eastern ties, served up as an exotic remnant proffering both wisdom and colorful decoration. In other words: intriguing—but also a little superficial.
The exhibition at Raster opened during Warsaw Gallery Weekend, which aimed to galvanize a fledgling Polish art market and bring it into the broader Western spectrum. Paradoxically, no artist or collective suits this goal better than Slavs and Tatars. But to escape the dense cobweb they spin, let’s quote the Gershwins: Potato, potahto!
Interview with Slavs and Tatars
by Federica Bueti
The first time I talked with Slavs and Tatars
was by Skype, then I met them again (or perhaps for the first time
depending on how you count these things) after a performance/lecture (79.89.09)
they'd given at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin. Since our first
meeting, we have engaged in several discussions and exchanges. The
following informal discussion took place over e-mail. It represents only
a small window on Slavs and Tatars's vast field of interests.
Federica Bueti: As
you state on your website: "Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics
and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and
west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia." Could you talk to me a
bit more about the origins of your collaboration? When and where you
decide to start to the project?
Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names, Wall application, for "The Past is a Foreign Country," Center for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland. 2010,
Slavs and Tatars: We
founded Slavs and Tatars in 2006 for equally intellectual and intimate
reasons. Of course, we are interested in researching an area of the
world–Eurasia–we consider relevant, politically, culturally,
spiritually. But it is also the result of the end of a “western promise”
to some degree in our respective lives: after having lived in the major
metropolises of the West (London, NY, Paris), studied in some of the
finest institutions, worked with leading companies, etc. we feel there
is something missing.
FB: What do you mean with "something is missing"could you explain...
ST:
We take issue with various ideas: the positivism that seems to be so
rampant in the West; the pragmatic nature of knowledge versus
initiative; the experiential nature of wisdom; the idolization of youth
coupled with the dismissal of age; an excessive emphasis on the rational
at the expense of the mystical; the segregation of children from adults
at social functions; splitting dinner bills; disproportionate attention
to the individual over the collective…
A Thirteenth Month Against Time, mimeograph print, off-set hand laid stickers, 21x28 cm, 2008.
FB: There are two points in your statement which I would like to
discuss: One is the transmedial approach-—you have produced posters,
objects, books, t-shirts, lectures—your
practice is, in its way, extremely pop. The popular media appropiation
seems a way you get closer to the audience. Could you explain your idea
of artistic intervention and the position you take in the visual field?
ST:
Our work across different media stems from two things: first, a notion
of indistinguishability: in a period suffering from a tyranny of
transparency as is ours, it is important to be there where you are not
expected. Working across several media also allows a polyphonic voice:
we do not want our work to be only of relevance to a specific industry,
whether the art world or academia. The second is a matter of access: we
are not precious and would like our work to be accessible to a large
group as possible.
FB:
The second point is the need for revisiting and discussing history.
What does discussing Eastern History means today that we are facing the
decline of an unitarian and true Western Civilization?
ST:
We are interested particularly in redeeming, preserving, sharing and
revising certain areas of Eurasia’s history because we feel it is of
particular relevance to larger issues facing the West today: if, for
example, we are to believe there is somehow a clash between the East and
West or between Islam and the West, then it makes sense to look at
perhaps the only area in the world where these have co-habited
successfully.
Meanwhile,
certain traditions and heritage are at risk of being dismissed in the
region’s efforts at modernization. Too often, across Eastern Europe, the
Caucasus, and Central Asia, modernization is equated with
westernization, to disastrous effects and ironically at the very moment
as you mention that this Western narrative is in doubt and decline.
ГОРЫ ОT УМА
Горе от Ума (Gore ot Uma) is a famous 19th-century play about Moscow manners by Aleksander Griboyedov, a close friend of Pushkin’s and diplomat to the Czar in the Caucasus. The play is translated in English as WOE FROM WIT or THE MISFORTUNE OF BEING INTELLIGENT. By changing the Е in the original Russian title to an Ы,the title becomes MOUNTAINS OF WIT and the urban premise of the original work is hijacked by an imaginative Caucasian setting, one which played an influential role in Griboyedov’s life and death.
"Ruins of Our Times," Ministry of Transport, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2010
Wall painting, 180 x 200 cm.
Горе от Ума (Gore ot Uma) is a famous 19th-century play about Moscow manners by Aleksander Griboyedov, a close friend of Pushkin’s and diplomat to the Czar in the Caucasus. The play is translated in English as WOE FROM WIT or THE MISFORTUNE OF BEING INTELLIGENT. By changing the Е in the original Russian title to an Ы,the title becomes MOUNTAINS OF WIT and the urban premise of the original work is hijacked by an imaginative Caucasian setting, one which played an influential role in Griboyedov’s life and death.
"Ruins of Our Times," Ministry of Transport, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2010
Wall painting, 180 x 200 cm.
FB: Could you give us a precise definition for your terms "Westoxification" or "Occidentosis"?
ST: The
term Qarbzahdegi, translated as Westoxification or Occidentosis, was
first popularized as the title of a 1962 polemical booklet by Jalal al-e
Ahmad, a social critic in Iran. Westoxification was used to describe
the condition of secular Iranians who passively subscribed to Western
values and did not sufficiently rely on their own cultural and religious
heritage. Our work confronts a similar condition in the post-Soviet
sphere where countries, in an effort to modernize, are subscribing
wholesale to Westernization.
FB: What is your personal approach to archivial materials?
ST: We
are particularly interested in the wild swings of information that
archival material offers, from the macro voice of statist propaganda to
the intimate whisper of the samizdat. There are different degrees of
abuse, if you will, to which we subject this material. On the gentler
end is transliteration, a fat ugly cousin to translation, but no less
important given that much of the research we do is in a non-Latin
script, whether Cyrillic, Arabic, Georgian or Armenian. Then there's
translation, simply making the material accessible to a global audience,
as we are doing with Molla Nasreddin, an early twentieth century Azeri
satirical periodical we are publishing later this year with
JRP/Christoph Keller. Finally, we also revise and play with certain
texts in a rather performative way as in our wall applications Mountains
of Wit or Chven Gaumardjos Sakartvelos: the idea of repetition and
historical continuity are crucial to the decision to work on an existing
text as opposed to composing one ourselves. It's equal parts
celebration and critique.
FB:
Often you use graphic design in your practice. . . how do you envision
and place the design in field of cultural production?
ST:
Given the important role of discourse in our work, we work with design
as an effective means of distributing content. We are not as interested
in graphic design formally as we are in its potential. As we mentioned
with humor or the use of pop, graphic design is simply one amongst many
tools we can use
79.89.09 Installation view. Lecture/performance, contribution to 032c, edition. 2009
FB: Experimentations? Is art a free port?
ST:
In some ways, yes. It does allow for an openness not found in other
disciplines today. Take for example our writing—at once analytic,
poetic, polemic–it doesn't sit entirely within journalism, fiction, or
academia but rather across these. Art definitely espouses these
interstitial spaces. The danger, though, is that one becomes satisfied
with occupying margins and never confronts the beast, so to speak.
Art's intensive energy of late should not dupe one into believing it is a
widely accessible or relevant world.
FB:
I'm interested in infiltration as a strategy for producing and
distributing ideas. What does infiltration means in your practice?
ST: Infiltration
means for us using your enemies language, for example pop. We are
acutely aware the use of pop is a tool to help share our enthusiasm and
interest in areas which otherwise remain obscure to large sections of
the globe. Infiltration is also another way of questioning linear,
positivist and rational approaches to knowledge.
FB: Is the crossing of boundaries between different disciplines only a potentiality or is it also a limit?
ST:
It is both interestingly enough. The very indistinguishability
mentioned above of course has its limits. We often feel that we are not
doing individual projects or pieces but rather installments in one
larger project that is Slavs and Tatars itself. We don’t mean this in an
insular, reflective naval-gazing way but by bleeding or blurring
disciplines, each project becomes a platform, nodal point or trampoline
for another and is informed by what follows and precedes its. So it
almost becomes impossible to reduce the work to a sound byte. 79.89.09
is a perfect example of this: at once a lecture, an edition, a mirror
piece, and an intervention in a magazine. But it is almost impossible to
discuss one part—say the role of mirror mosaics—without
discussing the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Russian revolution of
1917, the visual or folkloric language that accompanies revolutionary
ideology etc.
.
FB: Let's imagine a big cultural revolution. Which weapon do you find most effective?
ST: We
believe most in speaking and the physical presence that accompanies it.
If we look at knowledge vis-à-vis wisdom, the former is practical, it
can be distributed, ordered online etc. Wisdom, however, has a necessary
experiential, affective component and we are committed to restoring the
importance of presence, via conversation, education, or an event. It
would be preposterous for us to be against the digital or virtual:
rather we simply believe presence becomes all the more urgent in the
current climate.
FB: "Self-management
body-your fate in your hands," Prague 1989. Is that motto still
fundamental for your practice today? Could be this your real statement?
ST: We
do believe in the idea of self-determination but at the same time in a
resolute defeatism. It's probably a more Slavic defeatism than a Middle
Eastern one: that is, we know we will fail but we'll try our hardest
nonetheless.
Slavs and Tatars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Slavs and Tatars is an art collective and "a faction of
polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin
Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia" [1]. Founded in 2006, the group addresses a shared sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians.In 2009, Slavs and Tatars published Kidnapping Mountains with London-based Book Works: "a playful and informative exploration of the muscular stories, wills, and defeat inhabiting the Caucasus region"[7]. The book coincided with the exhibit of the same name at the Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art
For the Wola Art Festival
The collective has worked on primarily three cycles of work: the first, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance); the second, on the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, 79.89.09, A Monobrow Manifesto) and their third and current cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic. This new body of work includes contributions to group exhibitions–Reverse Joy
The collective has published several books which incorporate archival and experimental research, texts, original pieces, and innovative design.
• Kidnapping Mountains
• Khhhhhhh
|       |
|    Khhhhhhh, Mousse Publishing/Moravian Gallery; Brno, off-set print, 23 x 31 cm, 64 pages, 2012 Available via Mousse Publishing. Download PDF of the book. |
|  Before the Before, After the After Industrial foam, concrete, water-resistant paint, 145 Ø x 72.5 cm. Edition of 1 + 1 AP, 2012. A fruit of caricature, of the Other, the watermelon is used as a racist shorthand for African-Americans in the US, in Russia they recall the contested Caucasus, and in Europe the countries of origin of the migrant populations, be it Turkey, North Africa.” Placed in two pots by Robert Oerley at the entrance to their “Not Moscow Not Mecca” at the Secession, the watermelons call on visitors to experience the exhibition not just cerebrally but sensorially and affectively.  The Fragrant Concubine Hand-blown glass, paint, bulb, electrical socket, 27 x 18 cm (each), in bunch of 8. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Named after Xian Fe, the concubine from kidnapped from Uiguristan, China’s western-most, Muslim region, by the Qianlong Emperor, who requested the hami melons to remind her of home. Xian Fe never gave in to her suitor and the hami melon lights remain on in honor of her resistance.  How-less Needle-work, silk, cotton, 200 x 120 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. “You Know of the How / I Know of the How-less” is attributed to Rabia al-Adawwiya, a Muslim saint and Sufi mystic. Considered to be one of the first female Sufis, she is credited with pioneering the notion of Divine Love, central to the veneration of God in Sufi Islam.  Dunjas, Donyas, Dinias Fibreglass, steel, 52 x 30 x 25 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Long-standing Serbo-Turkic enmity make peace in Dunjas, Donyas, Dinias: the word for the fruit “quince” in Serbian–dunja–is a common name given to women as a symbol of beauty and happens to be the homonym of “world” in Arabic and Turkic, donya.  The Offering Carved wood, aluminum plate, inflatable rubber balls, 75 x 50 x 50 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. The role of hospitality is key to all three Abrahamic faiths. Yet, the root of hospitality is both guest and hostility. Here, a plate of inflated watermelon balls highlights the playful tension within the very notion of welcoming a guest into one’s home.  Holy Bukhara (Queen Esther Takes a Bite) Reverse mirror painting, mirror, 70 x 100 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Moving example of the syncretism – be it linguistic, religious, or ideological – found in Central Asia. Bokhori yeh Sharif is an homage to the Jews of Central Asia, aka Bukharan Jews, whose language (Boxori) provides an unlikely collision of Persian dialect with Hebrew script. Revising the epithet of Central Asia’s holiest city, Bukhara yeh Sharif, meaning “Holy Bukhara,” with one letter celebrates the language and the city’s pluralist approach to Islam.  Hanging Low (Bitter Sweet) Fibre-glass, foam, steel, 110 x 140 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Hanging Low pays homage to the conflicted relationship to memory, to pluralism, to joy thru mourning through the puckered lips of someone who smiles backwards. Józef Wittlin’s Mój Lwów (My Lvov) laments the loss of the plural identities, languages, and affinities of a city that was Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German and warns of memory’s selective, if unstated, agenda. He speaks of the strange mix of the sublime and the street urchin, of wisdom and cretinism, of poetry and the mundane—as a special indefinable taste, as bitter-sweet.  The Dear for the Dear Hand-carved wood, etching, needle-work, silk, 30 x 40 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. According to an Egyptian Proverb: Life is like a cucumber: one day in your hand, the next day in your ass.  The Crown Needle-work, cotton, feather, inflatable rubber balls 30 x 30 x 20 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Modeled after the branch of a mulberry tree, whose fruits are white or black, Long Live the Syncretics dangles ribbons delicately as a nod to the progressive, syncretic approach to Islam in Central Asia, where Buddhist, Hindu, and pantheist rituals are incorporated into the belief system.  Long Live the Syncretics Steel, paint, silk ikat, 150 x 320 x 100 cm. Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 2012. Modeled after the branch of a mulberry tree, whose fruits are white or black, Long Live the Syncretics dangles ribbons delicately as a nod to the progressive, syncretic approach to Islam in Central Asia, where Buddhist, Hindu, and pantheist rituals are incorporated into the belief system.  Not Moscow Not Mecca Not Moscow Not Mecca, Revolver Verlag/Secession, off-set print, 23 x 31 cm, 108 pages, 2012. Available via Secession Shop Not Moscow Not Mecca tells the collective story of syncretism—of Central Asia—from the perspective not of the fauna but rather the flora. More topographic, if not transcendent, an autobiography of the region’s fruits (from the persimmon to the mulberry, from the melon to the pomegranate) performs an etymological enema on triangulation. A platform of fruits—to read, experience, and taste—offers a third way, blessed between the two major geopolitical heavyweights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: communism and Islam. Download PDF of the book.  |
SLAVS AND TATARS: Not Moscow Not Mecca
Communism and Islam are the two grand narratives of
Central Asia, claim Slavs and Tatars, and they go further: "In fact,
Communism and Islam are the two most important geopolitical factors of
the 20th and 21st centuries." With the exhibition Not Moscow Not Mecca
in the Grafisches Kabinett and an outdoor installation at the Secession,
the collective formed in 2006 writes the "autobiography" of a region
that is little known in this country and that bears many names: from
Central Asia to Greater Khorasan, from Turkestan to Ma Wara'
al-Nahr—Arabic for "the land beyond the river".
With
this exhibition, which is part of a cycle of works with the title The
Faculty of Substitution, the artists pursue the theme of self-knowledge
in the broadest sense. "Substitution," say Slavs and Tatars with
reference to the title, "means the mental agility needed to develop
coordination and equilibrium so that we can tell one story through
another." Not Moscow Not Mecca is the title of the show at the
Secession—neither, nor. In their ongoing search for a basis for
comparison between cultures, between Orient and Occident, between
modernity and Islam, Slavs and Tatars discover similarities between
things that seem incomparable. These processes of equation lead to an
appropriation and reinterpretation of history, a process at odds with
the familiar narratives of the powerful and victorious.
So
what do the two large watermelons in the pots by Robert Oerley at the
entrance to the Secession tell us? "Watermelons are a caricature, the
fruit of the Other. In the USA, they are often used as a racist
substitute for African-Americans, in Russia they recall the contested
Caucasus, and in Europe the countries of origin of the migrant
populations, be it Turkey, North Africa, etc." Watermelons are also
pleasant on the eyes, their surfaces seduce with graphic relish, the red
flesh entices. They taste good. "And they are harbingers of spring, of
summer. Ver Sacrum!" They embody a call to approach the exhibition at
the Secession not only on an intellectual level, but also emotionally
and sensorially, an invitation that is repeated and pursued by the
"syncretistic shrine" inside the building.
The
artistic practice of the collective not only extends across the
heterogeneous Central Asian region but also across a variety of media,
disciplines, and formats, covering a broad spectrum of different
cultural registers. In their primarily research-based works, Slavs and
Tatars address issues such as antiquity and the past, the marginal and
oft-forgotten, presenting the results of their processes of study in the
exhibition space in poetic ways.
Finally, in
the Grafisches Kabinett, visitors are met by the "collective
autobiography of the flora of Central Asia" that takes the form of a
setting transferred from the region. Pomegranate, mulberry, sour cherry,
cucumber, persimmon, quince, fig, apricot, and melon, this time in two
varieties. "We offer many points of entry to the work," say Slavs and
Tatars, "it's actually like at a bazaar. We put things on display and
visitors choose the level of engagement they want." Based on the idea
that fruit acts as a medium or talisman to challenge familiar notions of
oral tradition and setting down in writing, Slavs and Tatars open up
issues such as the influence of landscape on memory, or the dichotomy
between sacred and profane knowledge, confronting them with the legacy
of western modernity.
The fruits in the
Grafisches Kabinett are served in bowls to be eaten and are also
presented in the form of enormous sculptures. From the branch of a
mulberry tree to inflatable watermelons, or a globe with the quince's
uneven surface in lieu of earth's smooth sphere. Each fruit stands for
one or more forms of substitution, be it linguistic, spiritual,
emotional, or political. They can be shared and enjoyed by the visitors
or considered as objects. But it is also possible to relax on the
mattresses from Uzbekistan or to read about the biography of the fruits
in the extensively-researched artist's book edited and designed by the
collective. Colored ribbons tied to the branches of a mulberry tree
stand for the particularly progressive religious syncretism, including
influences of Buddhism and Hinduism, in Central Asian Islam, an urgent
alternative to the often rigid view of the faith.
For
political syncretism, Slavs and Tatars chose a mirror—old, beautiful,
half blind. It bears the words "Boxori ye Sharif" (Noble Buchara), in
Hebrew. "Boxoro," another word for the Uzbek holy city of Buchara, also
refers to the script of the Jews who speak Farsi, but write using Hebrew
characters.
Originally a reading group, the
Slavs and Tatars collective was founded in 2006. They travel, they
conduct research, they have often lived in Eurasia and will continue to
travel and live in the region in the future. "We will dedicate the rest
of our lives to this region, and we want to share our enthusiasm for it
with others." Sharing and generosity, then, is a central formula of
their artistic work. Humor, they say, is generous because it leads to
shared laughter, hospitality is generous, the transmission of knowledge,
too.
Slavs and Tatars take a bold approach,
mixing popular and high culture, historical and current material,
supposedly incompatible levels and registers: "It is crucial to
resuscitate the historical. We don't know of a better way to demonstrate
its relevance to people who might otherwise consider our interests in
the region or the history as arcane or irrelevant. We use the word
resuscitation for a reason: its sensuality, the idea of breathing life
into a subject (by placing one's lips on the mouth of the area of study
if you will) points to an affective relationship with an idea or a
text."
Not Moscow Not Mecca is an exhibition
that is sensual, humorous, and intellectual at the same time, which is
something Slavs and Tatars also wish to be themselves, even as artists:
"We want to be both happy and intellectual." - www.thisistomorrow.info/
|    Mystical Protest (Muharram), paint on silk-screened fabric, fluorescent lights, 620 x 240 cm, 2011  Wheat Mollah, wheat, cotton, brick, with wood, brass and glass case, 45 x 145 x 45 cm, 2011  Study for Muharram banner with ‘Only Solidarity and Patience Will Secure Our Victory’ inscribed at the bottom, 2011 |
|        Molla Nasreddin featured in a special presentation at the Bidoun Library at Art Dubai.  Presentation of Molla Nasreddin at the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai.  Molla Nasreddin: Embrace Your Antithesis talk at SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul   Molla Nasreddin as part of A Rock and Hard Place at Alatza imaret, Thessaloniki Biennale: 3  Book Launch at Swiss Institute, New York  The Library of Equivocation (detail), river-beds, kilims, books, 2011  Adam Budak’s East: Excitable Speech: West as part of curated by_Vienna 2011. Installation view, Kerstin Engholm Galerie. Photo by Karl Kühn. When Satire Conquered IranSlavs and TatarsOne of the most important contributions to modern Azerbaijani literature and culture was the irreverent early twentieth-century magazine Molla Nasreddin. What follows is an introduction to the magazine by the artist collective Slavs and Tatars, together with a series of magazine excerpts featured in their book, Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, recently published by JRP-Ringier, in a series edited by Christoph Keller. —The Editors 
“I better hurry up and cover freedom faster so that no flies manage to sit on it.”
Managing to speak to the intelligentsia as well as the masses, however, the magazine was an instant success and would become the most influential and perhaps first publication of its kind to be read across the Muslim world, from Morocco to India. Roughly half of each eight-page issue featured illustrations, which made the magazine accessible to large portions of the population who were illiterate. And like the best cultural productions, MN was polyphonic, joyfully self-contradictory, and staunchly in favor of the creolization that results from multiple languages (it drew on three alphabets), ideas, and identities (its editorial offices were itinerant between Tbilisi, Baku, and Tabriz). While it helped give rise to a new Azeri intellectual culture, Iran was arguably the country where it had its greatest impact: MN focused relentlessly on the inefficiency and corruption of the Qajar dynasty, and its essays and illustrations acted as a preamble of sorts to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1910, which resulted in the establishment of the first parliament in all of Asia. During Molla Nasreddin’s two and a half decade run, the country at the heart of its polemics and caricatures—Azerbaijan—changed hands and names three or four times. By 1920, the Soviets had invaded Baku; the quality of the magazine’s editorial and art-direction suffered considerably as it was forced to toe the Bolshevik party line. Only three issues came out in 1931 and shortly afterward it shut its doors for good. Its impact, however, is difficult to over-estimate. Molla Nasreddin offered inspiration to similar pamphleteers from the Balkans to Iran and Serbia. The Azeri newspaper Irshad coined the term “Molla Nasreddinism” to describe the ability to tell things as they are.
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