Slavs and Tatars

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, the group’s work is centered on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture performances.

The collective's work is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and performance-lectures.

Their exhibitions often take place in the public sphere: via public space, institutions or media. The artists came to prominence with their "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz" at the 10th Sharjah Biennial, offering 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."

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., featured 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 has published several books which incorporate archival and experimental research, texts, original pieces, and innovative design.

• Kidnapping Mountains (2009, Book Works): on the Caucauses.

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