Slavs and Tatars is a 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" [1]. Founded in 2005, the group addresses a shared sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians.
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"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." [2] From the outset, print media has played a significant role in their work: namely, the Slavs Poster (2005) and the Nations (2007) series, with such quirky aphorisms as 'Men are from Murmansk, Women are from Vilnius' and 'Nice Tan, Turkmenistan!' exhibited at the 2nd Moscow Biennale and 10th anniversary of legendary Parisian Colette (boutique)[3]. The medium of print offered the group the opportunity to distribute delicately produced polemics and ephemera to a relatively wide audience, such as the Drafting Defeat:10th Century Roadmaps, 21st century Disasters, a series of 10th century maps of the Middle East by Al-Istakhri[4]. "Language is at the heart of [their] practice"[5] as is a brutal sense of humour and a suspicion of positivist thought and of modernization as a guise for westernization. Their work "attempts to reclaim history by retelling it, and primarily through the perspective of the defeated, as opposed to the victors."[6]
In 2009, Slavs and Tatars published Kidnapping Mountains with London-based Book Works: "a playful and informative exploration of the muscular stories, wills, and defeat inhabiting the Caucasus region"[7]. The book coincided with the exhibit of the same name at the Netwerk Centre for Contemporary Art in Aalst, Belgium.
Slavs and Tatars' work often takes place in the public sphere: via public space, institutions or media. They have repeatedly collaborated with and been featured in 032c, the bi-annual culture publication from Berlin. Their year long project 79.89.09 looked at two key dates–the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the fall of Communism in 1989–to better understand the historic year of 2009. 79.89.09 was exemplary of the multidisciplinary work of the group: consisting of a lecture series, a print edition, a mirror mosaic Resist Resisting God as well as a feature in two consecutive issues (17 and 18 respectively) of the Berlin-based culture magazine 032c.[8] The 79.89.09 lecture series has been presented at the Rietveld Academy's Studium Generale in Amsterdam, Triumph Gallery, Moscow, the Dutch Art Institute, the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University as part of the Edifying series of performative lectures, and the Nordic Embassies in Berlin as part of Correct Me if I'm Critical. For the 10th Sharjah Biennial, the collective presented "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz", an elaboration on "79.89.09" which looked at the folklore and crafts accompanying the ideological impulses of the end of Communism and the beginning of revolutionary Islam.
Hymns of No Resistance–the group's first performance piece, performed by a Kurdish quartet–consisted of four pop songs rewritten to address geopolitical issues of identity, language, and territorial disputes. Stealers Wheel' "Stuck in the Middle with you" became "Stuck in Ossetia with you" about the Georgia-Russia war of 2008 while Michael Sembello's "She's a Maniac" (from Fame) becomes "She's Armenian" about the Armenian diaspora.
For the Wola Art Festival, in the historical Wola District in Warsaw, S&T created Idz na Wschod! (or Go East!): a billboard featuring Charles Bronson (in fact from Lipka Tatar not Mexican or Native American heritage) invites Warsaw's residents to defy their parents and their government and head not west but rather east. A full-day trip for 50+ people was organized to the Polish Tatar villages of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany near the Bieolrussian border to visit the Polish Tatar mosques, cemeteries and a Tatar meal.[9] Idz na Wschod! offered an alternative, more cosmopolitan reading of Polish national identity, one unfortunately often considered homogeneous; as well as a unique, progressive view of Islam, via the vernacular architecture and customs of the Polish Tatars.
In early 2010, Slavs and Tatars published Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names with Onestar Press: a selection of 150 Eurasian cities whose names have been caught like children in the spiteful back and forth of history's custody battle. Some of the cities, i.e. Odessa, reveal a wholly Asian heritage in their previous monikers (in this case, Hadjibey). Love Me, Love Me Not was also part of the The Past is a Foreign Country exhibition at the Center of Contemporary Art 'Znaki Czasu' in Torún, Poland. The collective also participated in the Frieze Sculpture Park in Regent's Park with their Monobrow Manifesto, a large inflatable featuring the faces of a monobrowed Middle Eastern man on one side and Bert (Sesame Street) on the other.
Their "Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz" at the 10th Sharjah Biennial offered 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." [10]
The collective has published several books which incorporate archival and experimental research, texts, original pieces, and innovative design.
• Kidnapping Mountains (2009): on the Caucauss, published by Book Works.
• Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (2010). An inventory and mapping of the names of 150 cities across Eurasia.
• Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would've, could've, should've (2011) on the legendary early 20th c Azeri political satire Molla_Nasraddin_(magazine) with Christoph Keller Editions and JRP-Ringier. The book received favourable reviews from the international press, including The New Yorker, Guardian, Asian Review of Books, and Turkish daily Radikal. Don J Cohen writes "[I]n the wonderfully reproduced color illustrations in this book...a range of subject matter [is] presented: landlords and peasants, marriage and class, women's rights and education, interethnic group rivalries, the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, sacred and secular, Muslims and Christians. Editorial commentary and translations of the actual captions from the five languages that appear in the texts-Azeri Turkish, Russian, Farsi, Istanbulli Turkish and Arabic-go part of the way to educate the reader; but many of the subscribers to the magazine were illiterate. As intended, the pictures tell the rest of the story most convincingly." [11]
"Humor, and its potential to offer a seductive form of critique, allows them to introduce their arcane subject matter to a broad international audience, and move beyond the weary rhetoric of identity politics and postcolonialism," writes HG Masters in Asia Art Pacific [12] Slavs and Tatars has been described by Holland Cotter of The New York Times as "a publishing concern...with a worthy mission (to focus on multicultural Eurasia)"[13] and Shaun Walker in Fantastic Man calls it "an ambitious project that aims to look at the Eurasian region as a whole."[14] Bidoun Magazine says that for Slavs and Tatars "geography becomes a metaphor for something bigger, something unwieldy—lost histories, accidents, oversights, mistakes. Geography can also be a provocation, an occasion to think again." In an article in Artforum, Tate curator Nicholas Cullinan writes that the group is "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."[15]
Their work (Slavs, the Nations series and the artist-book A Thirteenth Month Against Time) is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.