The world that Slavs and Tatars has imagined into being over the past two decades is one where binaries are irresistible and inescapable, but at the same time (or perhaps for that very reason) pose the potential to be pleasurably finessed out of existence. East and West, highbrow and lowbrow, rarified and vernacular, modern and not—all of these oppositions yield in Slavs and Tatars’ work to spectrums of possibility, fields of ambiguity, and random patterns disguised in the formal rigor of the modernist grid.
Consider, for example, an early series of vacuum-formed plastic panels titled Tranny Tease (pour Marcel) (2009), part of an ongoing cycle of works called Régions d’être, an obvious play on the French raison d’être, or “reason for being.” The work delves into the politics of transliteration, meaning when a language with one script is awkwardly, and often phonetically and therefore approximately, squeezed into the script of another. Here, with the panels arranged on a wall like a tidy display of car license plates attesting to the diversity of states, comical errors emerge from the mismatch between what is being said and how. Shakespeare’s existential English monologue “To be or not to be,” for example, becomes the chant of a silly drinking game, “To beer or not to beer,” in Arabic.
The title Tranny Tease (pour Marcel) nudges Marcel Broodthaers, one of the most formidable tricksters in the Slavs and Tatars pantheon, alongside the donkey-riding Sufi wisecrack known as Molla Nasreddin, or, more recently, the barber-surgeon philosopher of darkness Johann Georg Hamann, into sexual innuendo of an indeterminate nature.3 It also includes the enduring and classically Slavs and Tatars couplet “Dig the booty of monoglots / But marry, my child, a polyglot.” Not for nothing is the collective’s logo a ludicrously extended tongue, looping and rolling, capable of mastering all manner of languages while lashing out, serpent-of-knowledge and viper style, to make any number of astute literary and artistic allusions. It is exactly this collapsing of opposites, of rumpling the formal academic language of intellectual or esoteric references with informal slang, elbow ribbing, and a certain knowing conceptual cleverness, that has divided critics on the question of how seriously to take Slavs and Tatars at all.
As a collective, Slavs and Tatars is ostensibly the work of three people: Payam Sharifi, Kasia Korczak, and lead designer Stan de Natris. Iterations of the group have occasionally numbered differently, and of course, the notion of collectivity here is honest, in that no contemporary artist makes or shows their work alone. Korczak previously worked as a designer of artists’ books. Sharifi studied comparative literature, notably Russian, and spent time as a researcher and strategist in the public and private sectors. One of their motivations for launching the residency program, as Sharifi has told me, was to address the fact that when it comes to young artists in the art world, “no one’s preparing these people to live past the age of thirty.”4 From working in other fields, the founders of Slavs and Tatars knew, intimately, that the art world was financially illiterate and psychologically unstable. Therefore, one crucial aspect of the residency program is mentorship on the level of daily life and future planning.
Slavs and Tatars appeared at a time when collectives were unabashedly in vogue. The Black Audio Film Collective had begun making experimental work in the early 1980s. Raqs Media Collective started out a decade later. The Otolith Group of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun was formed in London in 2002. CAMP, a collective studio based in Mumbai with special interests in early cinema and archival concerns, was founded by Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhangar, and Ashok Sukumaran in 2007. The group known as GCC, equally adept at irreverence and humor, took shape in the VIP room of the Art Dubai fair in 2013 and staged its debut exhibition at Sultan Gallery in Kuwait shortly thereafter. By the time Abounaddara,
a group of Syrian filmmakers, began posting and sharing a series of short, precise videos known as “bullet films” every Friday as part of the mass demonstrations for dignity and democracy that erupted all over the country in 2011, the need for collectivity and the exigency of anonymity had become far more serious and dangerous. Moments of playfulness flashed through their work, but the humor was darker, the sarcasm bending toward cynicism.
Slavs and Tatars owed something to that lineage and belonged to that grouping, but also diverged and departed from it—first of all, because they were funny and flirted with fashion. Early on, they designed T-shirts for Uniqlo and the Paris boutique Colette. Second of all, because they established themselves as a collective in response to a world defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the end of area studies. They seemed, to me, most interested in raking through an exploded order to find the pieces that didn’t fit anywhere—Muslims far from the Middle East, Russian speakers outside of Russia—as well as the connections and through lines that had been repressed. Among them were books that had fallen out of favor. One of the texts they read and shared as part of the initial reading group—with ample commentary and a contemporary redesign, becoming a work of printed ephemera titled Drafting Defeat: 10th Century Road Maps & 21st Century Disasters (2007)—was Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts (1870), an autobiography in relation to the Russian Empire that had been deemed overly Francophile and insufficiently Marxist. And third of all, because they have become something significantly bigger—and different—from what they were when they began.
It’s interesting to note that Slavs and Tatars were also initially anonymous. “It’s not so much anonymity that interests us, as a disinterest in biography,” Sharifi explained to me. “We were never strictly anonymous: we never hid our faces or scrambled our voices, for example, during public lectures.” Rather, anonymity was a form of deflection. “It’s important as a discipline to avoid the personal, the biographical, the individual, and try to err on the side of the anonymous and the collective. Ideally, there would be plenty of options between anonymity and exposure, but those often seem to be presented as a binary.”
“This tension in our work is unresolved,” Sharifi continues. “On one hand, we make great efforts toward availability: from the very act of publishing, to making our books free on our website, to creating spaces of hospitality to engage with texts, to our studio, which sits in a ground-floor retail space with large windows onto the street, without tinting, without curtains. I would say our very interest in print stems from this belief in availability. On the other hand, we are suspicious of [availability’s] excesses. While a lot of great art is about the artist’s subjectivity, ours really isn’t. We founded Slavs and Tatars in response to the world, not in response to an inner desire or becoming.”
That is why, around 2016, a decade into the collective, Sharifi and Korczak decided to rethink what Slavs and Tatars was and where they were going. The residency program launched two years later. Pickle Bar opened in 2020. Then, as an example of all these initiatives coming to fruition and the air of freedom they had restored to the group, Slavs and Tatars held their first gallery show in years, at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin in 2023 (the group is also represented by the Third Line in Dubai, Tanya Bonakdar in New York, and Raster in Warsaw, among other galleries).
“Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler has two spaces,” Sharifi explains, “and we decided to invite four artists to show works in the space adjoining ours.” Slavs and Tatars installed Soft Power (2023), a huge woolen carpet designed to look like a wall of a room, with a cutout of a door in the middle, as the literal threshold; one walked through their textile to find a parallel show of work by Dozie Kanu, Andrey Anro, Lin May Saeed, and Mina Masoumi. Anro, an artist from Belarus, had been in Berlin for the Slavs and Tatars residency program in 2020. The late Lin May Saeed was an artist whose work Slavs and Tatars discovered while they were curating the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in 2019.
In 2011, Nicholas Cullinan, at the time a curator at Tate Modern, now director of the British Museum, described 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,” but worried, “At what point does polemical work that flaunts its political claims become radical chic, or a collective merely a clique?”5 Art historian Colby Chamberlain likewise summoned the ghost of Rosalind Krauss to wonder whether groups like Slavs and Tatars would bring about the death or corruption of institutional critique.6 Curator and writer Anders Kreuger, writing in Afterall, noted a tendency in the work of Slavs and Tatars to skirt political conflict and human rights abuses in territories that otherwise concerned and fascinated them.7
What has become clear in the years since those criticisms were made is the extent to which Slavs and Tatars are creating a holistic world—for themselves, their network, and their sense of collectivity. Consider the girth and comfort of their carpeted, book-filled RiverBed (2017). Consider their projects on the transnational origins of ayran, or playgrounds, or the importance of pickles and winter melons (melons manifest in a series of gorgeous hanging sculptures like alabaster lighting fixtures) as provisions for seasons to come. What Slavs and Tatars imagine is a place open to reading and thinking and resting, where regions can be expansive, and historical connections (and conflicts, and repressions) can resurface without blowing up in our faces.
From the Mousse Magazine website.
