Slavs and Tatars: Simurgh Self-Help

In Gallery One, Slavs and Tatars juxtapose the eagle and Simurgh to offer a speculative history and an alter-ego of contemporary societies facing profound dilemmas about national identity and nationalism. By ‘translating’ the eagle into a Simurgh, the collective expands Broodthaers’ original critique to include oft-overlooked regions such as Central Asia and the Caucasus, situated between fading empires—Russian, Ottoman, Persian—and contemporary revanchist forces. If the eagle serves as a repository for nationalism and empire—matters of this world in the geopolitical sense—the Simurgh helps us unlock a realm of senses and the otherworldly: from the affective to the extractive.

The Simurgh also performs as an allegory for spiritual elevation and self-knowledge, often portrayed as a flaming, gender-fluid entity, in contrast with the rigid masculinity symbolized by the eagle. The reach of this otherworldly bird extends from today’s central Ukraine (Semargl, one of the nine pagan gods of pre-Christian Kyivan Rus’) to the Uyghur region in present-day China. It is fitting then, that one of the most prominent allegories of the Simurgh is the Sufi notion of finding oneness in multiplicity.

With the ability to fly, to travel, to sing, birds have long enchanted humans as symbols of liberation, from the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ The Birds (Ornithes) to the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. Attar’s 12th-century masterpiece famously stages an epic journey of several birds in search of Simurgh. The literary device encapsulates the essence of democracy as a system that honors the voice of the individual while emphasizing the importance of collective decision-making, sharing, and action.

In Gallery Two, the artists present a new body of work about melons as Central Asian repositories of value, knowledge, and world-building. Writing, central to the artists’ practice, appears in the texture of melon skins and the pages of a book. Here, melons, as glass lamps or mirrors, tell the story of the region via flora, as opposed to fauna.

According to Uzbek legend, melons originally grew only in the Garden of Eden. One day, the fruits were bestowed upon humanity by the Almighty, who had inscribed a message on their surface before sending them to earth. The presence of tiny cracks on the ripe melon caught the attention of the locals, as they were reminiscent of Arabic script. A pattern is never repeated, so with each melon, the people were not only gifted a treat, but new knowledge. Unfortunately, the people could not decipher the melons’ message.