Art collective Slavs & Tatars on their "bazaar" approach

The work of Slavs & Tatars is awash with unlikely cultural references, balloons, archives and carpets. Identifying “the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China” as the focus of their work, their projects are generous, engaging and genre-crossing. Starting as a reading group before shifting into making their own work, Slavs & Tatars have recently been working on a continuation of their Long Legged Linguistics project, a multi-faceted study of language as a source of emancipation. The somewhat secretive collective were kind enough to tell us more about this and their “bazaar” approach to making work.

What were your intentions when you started as a reading group, did you see yourselves shifting into producing work?

Our intention was to publish a couple of books per year, at best. We never intended to practice as artists, though this is perhaps testament to the permissibility of the discipline. Art is one of the few where questioning its own limits or definition is significant if not central to the discipline. The subsequent “fanning out” of media from strictly publications in our first couple of years of existence runs counter to the stern rarefaction we often associate with modern and contemporary art. It is reminiscent of a souk or bazaar. Our Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, for example, tells the story of 21st Century Iran through that of 1980s Poland and solidarity. The project began as a magazine contribution, to later include a balloon, an archive, textile works, public billboards, lectures, publications, a mirror mosaic, and craft-specific sculptures. Stemming perhaps from our regional focus, this maximalism allows the audience different levels of entry to the project.

Your multi-faceted, “bazaar” approach is interesting, what would you say is the motivation?

This not-only-but-also approach requires us to engage with the notion of generosity: to face our audience, as opposed to making work that could remain insular or only relevant to an art professional. It acknowledges different interests, needs, and people. With a couple years of hindsight now, it seems this proliferation of media is a natural evolution or a case of totum simul (meaning “at the same time”): our books after all also function in a similar fashion. They are at the crossroads of several genres but not quite any in particular: intimate but not memoir, analytical but not academic, actual but not journalism.

The Love Letters carpets are part of an ongoing series Long Legged Linguistics, an investigation of language as a source of emancipation – could you tell us more about the series?

The carpets revisit the issue of alphabet politics, to what extent alphabets accompany empires of the Turkic languages. Hitherto, we’ve confined ourselves to our geographic remit, and focused mainly on the Muslim peoples of the former USSR and Russian empire, in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Here, we extend our focus to the two extremes, if you will, of the Turkic speaking world: the Republic of Turkey itself on the western frontier and Xinjiang and Uighur language on the eastern frontier.

The carpets are based on illustrations by Vladimir Mayakovsky, depicting the wrenching experience of having a foreign language imposed on one’s native tongue, and the “linguistic acrobatics” involved in such change, could you elaborate on this?

We often assume that phonemes [basic units of language] have a natural or innate relationship with the grapheme [a letter representing a sound] assigned to them. Instead, it’s a highly complex process, one that excavates issues of faith, identity and nationalism, amongst others. As Marshall Mcluhan said: “Letters are not only like teeth visually, but their power to put teeth into the business of empire building is manifest in our Western history.”

You’re taking part in ArtDubai this March, could you tell us more about your contribution to the biennale?

We are currently preparing Mirrors for Princes, the first solo exhibition at the newly inaugurated NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. It looks at the Medieval genre of statecraft or advice literature called “mirrors for princes” or speculum regnum. Ghazali’s Nasihat al muluk, Nizam al-muluk’s Siyasat nameh, or Machiavelli’s The Prince are among the most prominent examples. We’re interested in what these texts say about the role of faith in public life today. A millennium ago, the overwhelming majority of scholarship was devoted to religious affairs (jurisprudence, theology, etc), these texts carved out a space for statecraft. Today, we suffer from the very opposite: a secular rage to know it all. There’s no shortage of political commentators around but a notable lack of intelligent, eloquent discourse on the role of faith, the immaterial, or what Rudolf Otto would call “the holy other,” in public life.