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". Founded in 2006 as a collaboration between artists and designers Payam Sharifi and Kasia Korczak, the group’s work is centered on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture performances.

History and Work

Slavs and Tatars' exhibitions, books, printed matter and lecture-performances draw upon the stylistic palette of popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.

Nicholas Cullinan Nicholas Cullinan (born 1977) is an art historian and curator. On 6 January 2015 it was announced that he would be the 12th director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a post he took up in the spring. Cullinan was born in Connecticut a ...

Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...

describes Slavs and Tatars as "the most cosmopolitan of collectives, where a geopolitics of globe-trotting allows their shape-shifting projects and concerns to continuously cross-pollinate divergent, and sometimes diametrically opposed, cultural specificities.” The artists’ work can be organized according to cycles of research, each on a different theme or topic, from alphabet politics (Language Arts), to medieval advice literature (Mirrors for Princes) to an investigation of syncretism (Not Moscow Not Mecca). H.G. Masters in Asia Art Pacific writes: "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." An important feature of their multi-disciplinary work is the resolution of antitheses or what the artists call the "metaphysical splits.” "The push and pull of competing ideologies (Sufism and communism), iconographies (sacred and profane) and functionalities (useful and useless) drawn from Eurasian traditions are condensed into polemical statements or objects, each one the conceptual equivalent of that hypothetical gymnast’s body.”

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Slavs and Tatars' most notable solo exhibitions include: *Slavs and Tatars, Projects 98, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2012 *Slavs and Tatars, Not Moscow Not Mecca, Vienna Secession, 2012 *Slavs and Tatars
Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz
REDCAT, Los Angeles *Slavs and Tatars
Mirrors for Princes
Kunsthalle Zürich, 2014 *Slavs and Tatars, Concentrations 57, Dallas Museum of Art, 2014 *Slavs and Tatars, Mouth to Mouth, CCA Ujazdowski, 2017 *Slavs and Tatars, Nose to Nose
Argo Factory
2017 *Slavs and Tatars, Made in Dschermany, Albertinum, Dresden, 2018 Slavs and Tatars- Mother Tongues and Father Throats

Slavs and Tatars- Mother Tongues and Father Throats

Group exhibitions

Their work has been exhibited additionally at the Tate Modern,

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

in Paris, Istanbul Modern, Artists Space, NY, 8th Berlin, 9th Gwangju, 1st Yinchuan and 10th Manifesta Biennales, among other institutions.

Publications

The collective began as an informal reading group in 2006 and have since published 10 books with various publishers. These include: *''Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz'' on the unlikely points of convergence between Poland and Iran from the 17th to the 21st centuries (2nd edition, 2017, Book Works). *''Wripped Scripped'' (

Hatje Cantz Hatje Cantz Verlag (English: Hatje Cantz Publishing) is a German book publisher specialising in photography, art, architecture and design. It was established in 1945 by Gerd Hatje I.B. Tauris I.B. Tauris is an educational publishing house and imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. It was an independent publishing house with offices in London and New York City until its purchase in May 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing. It specialises in non ...

)a translation of the legendary 20th century Azeri satirical weekly. *''Khhhhhhh'': a look at sacred language via the phoneme hin Hebrew, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. In 2017, the first monograph on their work was published by König Books, edited by Pablo Larios. Mid-career survey of Slavs and Tatars traveled between institutions within the artists’ geographic remit: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; Pejman Foundation, Tehran; SALT, Istanbul; CCA, Vilnius.

Lectures

Slavs and Tatars lecture regularly at leading universities and museums including Yale University, University of Warsaw, Princeton University, UCLA, and NYU Abu Dhabi. Their roster of lecture-performances includes ''I Utter Other'' (2014–present) on Russian and Soviet Orientalism; ''79.89.09'' (2009–present) on the Iranian Revolution and Poland's Solidarność; ''Transliterative Tease'' (2013–present), on the march of alphabets accompanying empires; and ''Al-Isnad or Chains We Can Believe In'' on the role of faith in arts patronage via the works of Dan Flavin and a Dia Sufi mosque in New York City’s SoHo district.

References

External links

When Satire Conquered Iran

Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin – review

The Magazine that Almost Changed the World
Slavs and Tatars official website
Projects 98: Slavs and Tatars {{Authority control European artist groups and collectives