PAYAM SHARIFI
Hi Kathleen and Leah! The two of you have never met, right?
KATHLEEN REINHARDT
No! It would also be great to learn how you both met, Leah and Payam. I’ve known Slavs and Tatars personally since 2017, when we started working together for the 2018 exhibition Made in Dschermany at the Albertinum in Dresden. That was your largest museum show to date in Germany, and we agreed to call it a “mid-career survey.” It was fascinating to think the show through with you in this very specific context and place, also because the museum is part of a complex of museums comprising the state art collections. The Albertinum is dedicated to modern and contemporary art, but there are many other collections—the porcelain collection, the cabinet of mathematical and physical instruments, the Damascus room. It was inspiring to connect very different aspects of Slavs and Tatars’ practice to different timelines and objects in the collections. Since then, our paths have crossed quite a few times, also through other artists. For instance I asked Slavs and Tatars to contribute an audio guide of their favorite works to the exhibition I did with Lin May Saeed at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin.
LEAH FELDMAN
Nice to meet you, Kathleen! I met Slavs and Tatars around 2013. I had just finished grad school and we were in Paris. I was on a research trip, and you were still based there, Payam. We shared an interest in the multilingual and multi-confessional regions of the Caucasus and central Asia, and the complexity of thinking through the Soviet imperial project, but also Molla Nasreddin humor.1 We started working together around 2022 on the book Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anti-Colonial ABCs, which was published in 2024. It was supported by a Mellon Foundation grant through the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which allowed us to do some research together on Soviet children’s books and reading primers, and think about the sound book as a genre more broadly. As part of the project we co-taught the course Radical Reading, which explored modes of reading and genres of text such as manifestos, children’s books, comics, spellers, travel guides, and post-internet poetry.
We’re now working on an artist residency, research, and exhibition project through the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago called Costumes and Collapse that addresses how costumes, wearables, and textiles have been instrumentalized in the ordering regimes of empires, and have also materialized alternate ways of being and belonging—transforming the body and shaping our interactions with others and with our environment. We’re also collaborating on a new co-taught seminar in Berlin, also through the Gray Center, called Revolutionary Erotics, which engages erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, animating political contexts from communist, post-communist, and anti-nationalist politics to queer forms of world-building.
KATHLEEN
Revolutionary Erotics—great title!
PAYAM
As much as I wanted to speak to both of you, it felt somewhat intellectually dishonest to be on this panel, initially, because there’s something about the attention conventionally given to the artist that I find quite uncomfortable and unhealthy. I’ve been reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (2020), where he talks about how, with the loss of ritual and certain common symbolisms, the focus on the self has increased. He delves into the idea of communication without community, arguing instead for community without communication, calling for rituals and silence.
For me, talking about our work by talking about other people’s work is really important. We’re planning our first show in Hong Kong with Rossi&Rossi, and during our first call we spoke for a whole hour about the gallery’s work with the estate of Siah Armajani. I find this kind of deflection very important—how to redirect or deflect interest in a certain set of ideas, narratives, or people. For quite some time, we’ve tried to work such that each idea, or each piece, never becomes an endpoint in itself or a teleological dead end, but always a kind of a volley that leads elsewhere, a spore that then pops up somewhere else. More recently this has been happening with other artists, via curating for example. There are artists who understandably argue for more clarity today, especially as things are shifting so much, language is shifting so much. But I would also say that it’s more and more challenging to maintain or retain an elasticity. Even “ambiguity” is such a soft term. I don’t know what to call it, but the mystery that is art. And the mystery is not only to the public, it’s to yourself as an artist, as in, how to retain that mystery. Because once things become clear, they’re no longer interesting for anybody.
KATHLEEN
I’ve always liked thinking about how the collective Slavs and Tatars started from a reading group, a discussion space, then arrived at a point where you also provide room for other artists through Pickle Bar, a nonprofit project space in Berlin loosely themed around language and hosting artists and thinkers from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and central Asia.2 You also inhabit spaces with or through other artists. To me, the pavilions or rooms of Armajani are interesting in the sense that you think about being one with many and through many. You regularly invite artists into your “solo” exhibitions. With regard to collectivity and collaboration, do you think there’s a distinction? In what ways would you formulate this, also thinking about the individualism that is always highlighted in artistic practice, or what you referred to earlier with Byung-Chul Han?
PAYAM
“Collectivity” is for us much more generative than “collaboration.” We tend to shy away from words that are overused, and “collaboration” was latched upon and almost fetishized as soon as we became artists and no longer just publishers. I always found “collaboration” a bit weird because, first of all, it eclipses what people are doing every day, even when they’re not a collective. There’s this implication between collaboration and collectivity that makes people think, “Oh, because you’re a collective means that you’re interested in collaboration as an idea.” Actually no, we’re not interested in collaboration as an idea because it’s more something that you just do. It’s part and parcel of everything, something you’re doing every day. When it becomes so reified, or ossified, it becomes a kind of consensual decision making, which is not interesting for us, while the collective is very interesting for us.
When I heard about the show you have on at the moment, Kathleen, at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, titled Tea and Dry Biscuits, I immediately wrote to you because at the moment we’re thinking a lot about how samovars employ the same collective dynamic that our riverbeds do, in the sense that the riverbed offers a space for coming together, a multiuse space, as opposed to the chair. If we were to use this East/West binary, the individual chair is your space, and I have my space, and never the twain shall meet. But in the riverbed there is no “your space” versus “my space.” You can sit and read on it, you can lie on it, you can sleep on it, you can eat food on it. It’s not predetermined. And the samovar does the same thing. It is also a slap in the face of current consumption habits, which are that I want my matcha latte, you want your Americano, this person wants a mint tea. A samovar means everybody drinks one tea, together. It’s easy to think of this as forced. Some people might think, “Oh my God, that’s so imposing, it’s so strict.” There’s a thread between our consumption habits as individuals and our politics, or our sense of civic responsibilities as individuals. Not a direct line, maybe, but it’s definitely connected. The samovar is about coming together around one simple, quite pedestrian, cheap thing as opposed to waiting for everybody to have their particular beverage. A collective is, for me, almost a form of infusion.
KATHLEEN
Which also connects to the idea of ritual. Tea drinking is a ritual, of course.
LEAH
This brings us to another site where your work takes up the relationship between the individual and collective, namely language. I wanted to ask how language continues to be a transgressive site for you. In some sense, the linguistic turn was a central feature of twentieth-century art, activating the performative turn. But it strikes me that your work with language is less motivated by the conceptual or an effort to dematerialize, and more invested in material cultural sites. The samovar and the riverbed are gathering places, and also animate feelings of collective belonging. They can become playful sites of signification and desire. In the book Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018), you address how language, utterance, and their various scriptural forms mediate our relationship to sensuous embodiment, exploring the gender fluidity of Hurufism.3 Or in the exhibition Hang, Don’t Cut (at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler and Tanya Bonakdar in 2023), aphorisms and phonemes give shape to the melon as an important social-cultural object and expose the scriptural histories hidden in its contoured stripes. Why does language remain such a potent subject and medium in your work, and how does it structure your understanding of collectivity?
PAYAM
I think that languages are the closest thing we have to superpowers. And I say that not as a kind of a fanboy—I’ve never read a Marvel comic in my life and I’m not one of these Francophones who reads BD [bande dessinée, i.e., comic strip] into adulthood. I mean it in the sense that you are able to be somebody else in a different language. That is a magical thing, because your sense of humor is different, your affects are different, your facial gestures are different, the way your lips move is different. Something that I never cease to be in awe of. The undercurrent of a lot of things we’re talking about is that some of these things go against the rigidity of notions, both right and left.
The idea of “passing” that people have today, which considers it wrong to pass as somebody else—there’s no space to be somebody else beyond yourself in today’s environment, and that is imposed both from the left and the right. But language allows it, without some of the lightning-rod issues we’re all aware of. Whether it has to do with gender, race, ethnicity, whatever, language can pass between, beyond, these boundaries. That’s highly transgressive. Strangely, it shouldn’t be transgressive; it should be embraced.
LEAH
This reminds me of the Georgian expression, “The more languages you know, the more people you are.” But of course your work also launches a playful but potent attack on monolingualism. Even in your studio, where I had the chance to work with you on Azbuka Strikes Back, communal meals become an exercise in hetero-glossic world building—spices and inter-lingual puns braided around a table.
KATHLEEN
Payam, the last time we met in Dresden, I invited you to do the lecture-performance Red-Black Thread (2018). It was 2022, the Russian war on Ukraine had just started, and you introduced the lecture in a very heartfelt way—also because the audience was mainly scholars of Eastern and Central Europe—saying that Russian is now the language of the aggressor, but at the same time, it is also a shared language of a larger community that no one should be able to take away from us. Language can, on the one hand, be very much driven by ideology. On the other hand, it can be a creative and communal space. This is something you’ve been working on for decades.
PAYAM
It’s something dear to us, and something very sensitive, of course, given that Russian has become a lingua franca of so many peoples, not by choice. Particularly vis-à-vis the notion of race: I was rereading an essay we wrote for the Armajani catalogue in 2018, which was about this idea of the red-black thread,addressing the construction of blackness from the perspective of Russia, the Soviet Union, and communism. In the essay, we talk about the notion of polyglossia in reference to people like the Jamaican American poet Claude McKay, who wrote The Negroes in America (1922) when he was in Russia and starting to learn Russian. For whatever reason, his original English copy was lost, so the book came out first in the Soviet Union. Only when McKay returned to the States many years later, disenchanted with the communist project, did he have the book translated back from Russian into English.
This idea of mixed languages is quite similar to the idea of mixing races, in the sense that it seems to scandalize people—imagining that a Black American writer would write in Russian or would translate his own work into Russian. For me, it was interesting to consider notions of blackness at the time, following the George Floyd incident and Black Lives Matter, on one hand; on the other hand, it was a quaint time because Russia was the object of Russia-gate in the States—not yet a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country. Nonetheless, they were two things that people don’t put together: race and Russia. We’re always trying to tell one story through another, to bring things together that you’d consider disparate.
In terms of Russian as a language, as a lingua franca, we are really big fans of poets like Anuar Duisenbinov, whose works mix Russian and Kazakh, offering bilingualism as a form of queering language. I think we should support as much as possible the voices of people who are trying to make the Russophone world as heterogeneous as the Francophone world, for example. Nobody would consider French as belonging only to Emmanuel Macron or even the Fifth Republic. It also belongs to West Africa, and to so many other places and peoples. That unfortunately is not the case with Russian, for both very obvious and less obvious reasons. I think we’re facing a time when it’s increasingly difficult to find general points of commonality. If you look at what had already started with the fall of the Soviet Union, you have an understandable push toward national identities and people reading and writing their own languages, which is fantastic. However, the endgame involves people developing national identities in a kind of vacuum, and we know what that leads to.
The question is: How can we do both? How can we give agency to our own languages or our own identities that have been repressed, and yet turn the arms of a so-called dominant language against itself, so as to appropriate it? I think that’s where you find, as Byung-Chul Han says, more bottom-up points of solidarity. For us, the pickle is a language, Simurgh is a language, using wheat in festivals is a language. Those are different traditions that bind our region together, and we have to find other ways to define it.
Everybody is so unsatisfied with the term “post-Soviet,” and I understand. We should retire it. But what are we going to say instead? Maybe it’s not about finding a term, but about other ways of considering this space. The Simurgh project is our most recent body of work, and it has been very interesting to find Simurgh across the whole Turco-Persian world all the way to Xinjiang, and then somehow in the middle of Ukraine, in Chernihiv, there is Simargl, a pre-Christian Slavic god that’s supposed to be linked to Simurgh. Then it stops. All of a sudden, in Poland there’s only the eagle. The “empire of the Simurgh” and the “empire of the Eagle” could be an interesting way to define East and West—not by Cold War geopolitical structures, but by certain ornithological aspirations, or fermentations, or something else.
LEAH
What you’re saying about the Russophone I think does some important work in severing the linkages between national languages and ethnic identity that the Soviet system naturalized to sustain its vision of a multinational empire. In this way, your work with symbols—Simurgh and pickle—as both signifiers and material objects expands the heterodox possibilities of Russophone belonging in the (post-)communist space.
I wonder if you see the Simurgh as a site for reimagining internationalism? I’ve been thinking a lot about the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet idea, however deeply problematic, had an aspiration toward a literary and cultural commons. Its collapse, on the one hand, was a victory for national independence movements, but also led to the rise of authoritarian ethno-nationalisms. It’s really interesting to me how you choose these stories, myths, or figures and reimagine them as part of a world-building effort that exceeds the model of national territories. What draws you to these specific objects?
PAYAM
One is this thing that we call, for lack of a better word, stupid. And I say “stupid” with all the affection of what Molla Nasreddin would say about this kind of wise foolishness. Whether we’re speaking of the rural or slower, socioeconomic things, like the pickle—which is the least mansplaining thing in the food world, right? It’s so simple. It’s just salt water and a fruit or a vegetable. And yet it’s a device to unpack and talk about so many more complex things. To be frank, we’ve always been very aware of how uninterested the rest of the world is in our region. When we started out, in 2006, I remember telling Kasia Korczak, a co-founder of Slavs and Tatars: it cannot become any more remote than it already is. There was no way, I thought, that people could be less interested in central Asia and the Caucasus than they already were. Alas, I was wrong! Unfortunately, it’s just fallen down the ladder of things people think about, especially in the Anglo-American world. When you have that kind of sober approach to making work, you have to find a way to—I wouldn’t want to say demystify, but engage with and seduce. The pickle, the monobrow, or Simurgh are unassuming ways, and narrative devices.
Also, I think this helps in the present context, when so many museums and institutions are waking up to the fact that their publics are no longer bourgeois Western European or bourgeois white middle-class, and they have to appeal to new demographics. Institutions started expressing that much more explicitly after the pandemic, when engaging with us. I was suspicious about why we were getting so many institutional requests. Finally, they started to articulate it more openly: we want to bring in the Muslims of Philadelphia. We want to bring in the diverse Russophone communities of New York, whether it’s Uzbeks, Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians. And I realized that, instead of talking about decolonizing the space, what the samovar does, what the pickle does, what Simurgh does, is privilege the person from our region over the previous demographic of the museum. As soon as that Armenian dentist or Iranian engineer or Ukrainian teacher comes in, just by finding a samovar or a piece made out of wheat, it makes them feel like, okay, this space is not foreign to me. Again, it’s a subtle thing, but normally people from a given region feel that museums are not really speaking to them because they do not encounter symbols or experiences that resonate immediately. For us, these are ways to say: you are in good hands, you’re amongst your peeps. They’re all welcoming gestures, gestures of hospitality.
LEAH
Perhaps they become new pop icons. People cathect to them even if they don’t have a cultural connection.
PAYAM
You mentioned this idea of “new international,” and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, as we’re in an era where we have to choose a lesser evil. For instance how can we privilege our new needs of local languages yet not throw out, as the baby with the bathwater, the vast amount of literature written in the dominant language? If you go to the library of the French Institute here in Berlin, on Kurfürstendamm, the kids’ section has folktales and translations into French that I’ve never seen in any other language, and definitely not in English. There aren’t just stories from former French colonies, but also Ossetian folktales, or Kurdish stories, to name just a few, because the French believe they are a cultural exception. The Soviet Union tried to do that with Russian and it failed, as much as France is failing too, now. But let’s say that while they’re failing, there’s something to be gained from their fall from grace. It would be sad to embrace the flattening approach that English somehow delivers us from all this.
KATHLEEN
For me, it’s fascinating how you translate all those discourses on and about language into a materiality of language. I think we started to discuss your show at a moment when there was a big shift and a kind of “technoid” visual language was entering into your work, around 2017. Before that, you were using elements of folklore more widely. Your visual language then became a bit harder, in a way, which makes absolute sense if you think about Eurasia, where those languages visually coexist everywhere and don’t contradict one another, but rather complement one another, sometimes in almost absurd but endearing ways. I’d like to hear more about how that happened for you.
PAYAM
It was really on the occasion of your show that that shift became pronounced. All of a sudden, it went from people associating our work with carpets and textiles, to polished steel. In 2016, we had a mid-career survey, Mouth to Mouth, in Warsaw, Tehran, Istanbul, and Vilnius, and it was a moment for us to take stock of the first ten years of our practice, because we had founded the collective in response to the world. It’s important, in a sense, that we weren’t born to be artists. It wasn’t about us, or some kind of innate drive. It was really about the world. It felt like the world was overlooking something, and we wanted to address that.
By 2016, that world had changed. I think a lot—and in a very depressed way—about the fact that in 2006, when we started and decided to call ourselves Slavs and Tatars, the biggest problem facing Western Europe was the prospect of Polish plumbers coming in and taking jobs. Looking back to that moment now, we may say, well, if our biggest problem was Polish plumbers, which is such a nonsense problem, we will likely look back in twenty years at today and say, “Okay, those were good times.” It’s a devastating and frightening prospect.
We had to think about operating differently, because it was a different world. But different also in the sense that, fundamentally, we started to learn less in 2016. Not that we’d mastered anything, but making exhibitions was becoming a bit more routine. We had to find different ways to do what we were doing, and this meant another formal language. I really believe that as soon as you know what you’re doing, it means you’re learning less and you start dying. It’s as simple as that. Decline starts. As artists, it’s hard to change, because it’s rare that that transition will be fully understood. Usually, as soon as there’s some public resonance, an artist’s first response is to say, “Great, finally people get what I’m doing now, so I’m just going to do more of it.” Actually that’s a fatal error, because you’re not learning anymore. You’re doing it for the wrong reasons, namely to “scale up,” to use the language of business.
Specifically, about your question of form and the series of metal Gitters (2018), while our books revisit certain historical documents or resources, our job as artists is to break that archive, or to disrespect the document. Formally, our most successful works are the ones where there is both respect and disrespect. There has to be a mix of hard and soft language. It can’t be just hard and it can’t be just soft. For me, it’s a compositional thing. Too many carpets don’t work, and neither does too much metal. It’s almost like a recipe, with the right amount of hot and cold. I hate to say it, but steel is definitely not a liberating material. There’s nothing aspirational for me about steel, in the way there is about carpets. The Gitters allowed us to bring about that language of harshness that has felt more relevant to the world since 2016, when populism had made great inroads and Donald Trump had just been elected for the first time.
It continues to be very relevant, this idea of sharpening what we’re doing, but not by reducing the amount of people, or by means of navel-gazing. How can you sharpen, instead, by widening your language and not restricting your sphere of influence within your activities?
LEAH
You work across so many mediums, not only in carpet and metal, but in text, print, merch, lecture-performances. I’m curious how you think about the relationship between these practices in your work. Perhaps one could say your work has also recently expanded to include teaching. Has teaching changed the way you approach your work or understand collaboration?
PAYAM
There’s a maximalism, a bazaar-like proliferation of media, for sure. We ourselves at Slavs and Tatars are multiple and so have multiple desires, entry points. It also allows us to unravel a certain density the works have: not only peeling off layers, but also poking holes, thinking of porosity as a means of increased availability. As for teaching, it allows us to think with and through others. First came the residency and mentorship program in 2018, then curating the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial in 2019, followed by the Pickle Bar in 2020: all three of these initiatives share with teaching a dynamic of deflection, of refraction, of midwifing, of sharing or redirecting one’s time and others’ resources with those who stand to benefit. And in so doing we’re lucky to learn much ourselves.
KATHLEEN
In the meantime, that Eurasian space you’ve been at work on so specifically, and for such a long time, has become crucial in our current geopolitics.
LEAH
Perhaps one could say too, though, that your work with the imaginary of “Eurasia” also challenges the reduction of language, culture, ethnicity, religion to the framework of “geopolitics”?
PAYAM
What’s important to note is also that “Eurasia” is a loaded term, with a long history, starting from early twentieth-century Futurism and Orientalism but recently revamped by right-wing philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and revanchist notions of Russia as the new empire. Again, as opposed to ignoring or just disregarding the potential of this idea, I think it’s important that we try to recuperate or redeem what’s interesting about it. To what extent could we salvage a sense of commonality in this geographic space?
When I traveled to Iran while living in Russia, I was bewildered by how little Iran and Russia looked at each other—the educated classes, the economic elites, the laypeople—across all strata of society. There was this blind spot. So it’s not always about imagining Eurasia vis-à-vis the West, in a Cold War optic. If Russia and Iran are ignoring each other despite their realpolitik alliances, why are their cultures not interested in each other? It’s shocking also because the histories of these two countries are so intertwined across the Caucasus; Tehran as a capital was created to keep an eye on encroaching Russian imperialism from the North. It’s also surprising because this is not the fault of the West. It’s the fault of our own people, who allow ourselves to be driven by an agenda set by the West.
If you look at our work, what we’re trying to do in this Eurasian space is give voice to narratives that have been sacrificed or eclipsed by the larger narratives of the big powers. We’ve done almost no work specifically about Russia, not because we’re Russophobes, but just because we don’t think it’s necessary. Other people are doing that, so let them do it. And same goes for Iran.4 These are nations and cultures that are not suffering from a lack of attention, in any way, either political or cultural.
Even today, what I think Pickle Bar is trying to do—and I don’t want to speak for Anastasia or Patricia5—is create a space in Berlin for people from our region to get together in a way that’s not compromising. It’s almost considered problematic for a Kazakh, a Latvian, and a Pole to hang out because the only thing that many people think connects them is a former history of communism, which is nonsense. We could have had a whole conversation about regionalism, because I know that both of you are very interested in regionalism. Again, for us, regionalism is another one of those lesser evils. It’s not clean, it’s not without its faults, but if faced with empire on one hand and nationalism on the other, I will take regionalism any day. It can explain why Lviv in Ukraine has the best coffeehouses in the former Soviet space, because Lviv was the eastern outpost of the Austrian empire. It was at the heart of an area called Galicia, which is itself a fascinating term.
To come back to language: language groups allow that form of regionalism. So while we’re interested in Turkic languages, we’re not interested in Turkey or Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan per se. Again, it’s almost a form of self-discipline. Every time you’re tempted to fall back on an individual biography, don’t do it. Or on a nation-state level, don’t do it. Find another way of telling the story besides talking about an individual or a nation. It’s not easy, but it’s like when you’re a child and they say, “Every time you curse, put fifty cents in the jar”: every time we mention a nation’s name or an individual’s name, we should just tick, tick, tick.
Originally published in Mousse 92.
From the Mousse Magazine website.
