SlavS - The Third Line · by Slavs and Tatars’ well-informed, affectionate, but detached tone of...

ArtAsiaPacific 75 September & October110 Features artasiapacific.com

SlavS

and

TaTarS

ArtAsiaPacific 75 September & October110

ArtAsiaPacific 75 September & October Features artasiapacific.com 111

EclEcticism

ColleCtive

by HG MASterS

Features artasiapacific.com 111


(Previous spread) WHEaT MOlla, 2011, wheat, cotton, 20 x 11 x 6 cm.

(Opposite page, top to bottom) lOnG lIvE lOnG lIvE! dEaTH TO dEaTH TO!, 2011, die-cut wooden letters, metal, light bulbs. Installation view at the 10th Sharjah biennial, 2011. Photo by elizabeth rappaport.

FrIEndSHIP OF naTIOnS: POlISH SHI’ITE SHOWBIZ, 2011, mixed-media installation at the 10th Sharjah biennial. Photo by Gerardo Martinez.

All images in this article are courtesy the artist.

“Long Live Long Live!” and “Death To Death To!” read the strands of multicolored bubble letters draped from a limestone exterior in Sharjah’s heritage area. Along with evoking childhood birthday parties, the banners shared an unlikely visual kinship with the emirate’s lone Shi’ite mosque, located next door and adorned in white, blue and turquoise tiles bearing calligraphic inscriptions. To a pair of biennial visitors searching for shade at noon in mid-March—the day after the United Arab Emirates had sent police to join Saudi Arabia’s army in suppressing neighboring Bahrain’s Shia uprising—the cheerful jingles heralded respite, not revolution, despite their exaltations of life and death, and the undertones of a rapturous, quasi-mystical fervor.

Within the open courtyard, there were more offerings of comfort coupled with hints of crisis. Above a circular seating pavilion was a canopy of custom-woven carpets bearing phrases in English, Polish and Persian, including: “Beware the anti-imperialist imperialist,” “Help the militia. Beat yourself up!” “Self-Management Body — Your Fate in Your Hands.” Inside a small adjacent green-walled room, a classic Persian mirror-mosaic subtly embedded with the phrase “Resist Resisting God” hung from the wall. Dangling from the room’s ceiling were straw Polish folk decorations known as pajak (literally, “spiders”) and a turban made from wheat sat on a pedestal. Back outside, a quick-to-smile, dark-haired man and a more taciturn blonde woman gestured to a pile of newspapers bearing the title 79.89.09., and said it was suggested-reading material about their project Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz (2011), the product of two years of research into the demise of 20th-century communism and the rise of political Islam. The pair explained that the tapestries’ designs combined slogans and iconography from the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Poland’s Solidarność (“Solidarity”) movement of the 1980s. The duo offered cups of orange-blossom-scented tea and dried mulberries, and introduced themselves as “Slavs and Tatars.”

“Collectives scare people because they don’t know exactly what you do,” says one of the group’s members, this time in a conversation several months later. And it’s true: no one knows yet exactly what to make of the two-, sometimes three-, and once four-person, self-described “Eurasia-based” collective that investigates the “polemics and intimacies” of the area “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” But many people are curious about the group

with the catchy name that coins witty slogans—two of their posters from the “Nations” series (2007) proclaim “Nice tan, Turkmenistan!” and “Men are from Murmansk. Women are from Vilnius”—about the multiethnic region at the historical intersection of the Ottoman, Russian and British empires. Cultural institutions have taken an interest as the collective, whose practice of research, translation and publication began with the production of zines and posters, has increasingly turned to producing objects and installations. Slavs and Tatars are scheduled for a string of solo exhibitions in 2012, beginning at the Vienna Secession in May, a “Projects” show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in August, and then another project at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart that September.

Call it artistic research, or theorize it as knowledge production. Say it is the product of the new global economy or the deskilling of higher education; announce that information is now the ultimate commodity. However you explain what is happening, this is the decade when nearly every artist under 40 seems to be engaged in some kind of historical or cultural investigation, jetting off to regions once considered peripheral in order to document microhistories or to retell grand modern mythologies with new postcolonial wrinkles or long-neglected codas. As the artistic profession sheds any core identity based on the production of experiences or objects in a specific medium, “artistic practice” permits the identity of a generalist, accommodates curiosity and offers myriad public platforms for artists’ ideas. The contemporary art world is currently the preeminent cultural arena where chic meets geek. For their part, Slavs and Tatars are both—stylish in their creative output and personal appearance and also academically inclined. After all, they can make political puns in multiple Caucasian languages.

Here’s what we can say at the moment about the six-year-old group. The principal partners are an open secret. The dark-haired man is Payam, a Texas-born Iranian who has lived between Moscow, Paris and, most recently, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Payam requests that because they produce work in Iran he does not want to be mentioned by his full name in connection with Slavs and Tatars “in case something happens”—even though his own website, Twitter account and the Berlin-based magazine 032c that has published the collective’s essays, spell out his full name and give links to material about Slavs and Tatars. The other principal is Kasia, who grew up in Pabianice,


Poland, near Lodz. After 15 years of studying fine art and graphic design abroad and living in London and the Netherlands, she returned to, as she says now, “living in the Polish pine forest.”

Payam and Kasia are not a couple, and they haven’t lived in the same city for most of the collective’s existence. Nonetheless they talk almost daily on Skype and rendezvous for several days at least once a month somewhere in greater Eurasia, either to present a project, install an artwork or to do their research. In the division of labor, the gregarious Payam does a majority of the talking and writing, while Kasia, whose recent independent projects included the yellow guidebook and navigational signage for the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, takes care of the object-making and design work; together, the pair collaborate on research. The sometimes-third member is a Dutch graphic designer named Boy, who works on their bigger publications. Like any collective, Slavs and Tatars want to emphasize the activities of the group over its individuals—Payam speaks casually about “us” and “what we’re working on.”

Slavs and Tatars’ most complicated relationship is with the art world, toward which they maintain a strategic ambivalence. “At the start,” Payam says, “the idea wasn’t to be an art collective, just a collective. I now say we do ‘art’ because if we say we’re a research collective then we are judged on academic research, but we’re not as academic as academics.” He continues, “At the same time, you can’t bite the hand that feeds you. What we do couldn’t exist in another milieu and we’re really grateful for that.” With no obligations to an academic community—or indeed any specific community, be it professional, national or ethnic—the group eschews the commonplace equation of seriousness with intellectual rigor. 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.

This signature approach and attitude extends across their projects of the past three years. Their book of essays, Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, London, 2009), a self-described “exploration of the Caucasus with a willful intoxication of the muscular stories, muscular wills, and muscular defeat inhabiting these lands,” contains all of the paradoxes of the collective’s ventures, as well as the seeds of later projects. Its obscure subject matter is offset by the writing’s casual, sly and sardonic tone. “On Pan-Caucasianism (or, how the darkies tried to unite against the whiteys),” for example, offers a cursory introduction to three populist anti-imperialist fighters from three centuries, including current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The book’s pictures and design mixes high and low aesthetics, with images from Wikipedia and from historical archives, as well as reproductions of posters of their own design.

In April 2009, Slavs and Tatars transformed the themes of Kidnapping Mountains into various installations at the Netwerk Center for Contemporary Art in Aalst, Belgium. Filling the gallery space were mirror- and wood-paneled structures representing peaks in the Caucasian mountain range. A vacuum-molded plastic sign on the wall referenced the chaotic modifications of the Azeri language from Arabic to Latin script under Lenin (1928), to Cyrillic under Stalin (1939) and back to Latin letters after independence (1991). The piece bore the aphorism “Dig the booty of monoglots / but marry, my child, a polyglot,” in English below transliterations of the phrase in Arabic and Cyrillic letters. Also at Netwerk, they produced a wall painting in Georgian script: transliterated as “Chven Sakartvelos Gaumardjos,” which they say is “roughly translated as ‘Long Live Georgia.’” In red paint, Slavs and Tatars modified the piece to refer to another regional ethnic group still pursuing its own independence: “By changing the A of Sakartvelos to a U to make Sakurtvelos,” they explain in a text about the piece, “the phrase becomes Long Live Kurdistan and the unresolved geopolitical identity of one mountain people is replaced by that of another.”

Finding opportunities for wry political humor in the tumultuous

the contemporary art world is currently the preeminent cultural arena where chic meets geek. For their part, Slavs and tatars are both—stylish in their creative output and personal appearance and also academically inclined. After all, they can make political puns in multiple Caucasian languages.


“It is of utmost importance that we repeat our mistakes as a reminder to future generations of the depths of our stupidity.”

histories of peoples from the former Soviet regions is made easier by Slavs and Tatars’ well-informed, affectionate, but detached tone of voice, with its almost seamless integration of classical and contemporary references. Take, for example, A Monobrow Manifesto (2010), a large green balloon created for the sculpture park at the 2010 Frieze Art Fair. On one side, there is an image of the stern-faced warrior Rostam, from the 11th-century Persian epic poem Shahnameh, annotated with the word “HOT!” in red letters. On the opposite side is Bert of Sesame Street accompanied by “NOT!” For viewers who recognize the two figures but are puzzled by their connection, Slavs and Tatars—as is often the case with their work—provide the best gloss: “The monobrow is an epiphenomenon through which we can demystify the conflict between West and East often accepted as received wisdom. If in the West, the monobrow has been associated with delinquent behavior (Victorian England) or werewolves (France), in the Middle East and the Caucasus, the monobrow is a sign of virility and sophistication. That is, if in the southern parts of Eurasia, the monobrow is hot, in the US and Europe, it’s clearly not.”

Along with their evident delight in the convoluted linguistic and social histories of the Caucasus, Slavs and Tatars have developed several core theses, one of which landed on a T-shirt they designed for the Parisian clothing store Colette in 2006: Nous Sommes Les Anti-Modernes (“We Are the Anti-Moderns”). Slavs and Tatars use this idea—derived from Columbia University literature professor Antoine Compagnon’s book Les Antimodernes (2005)—to introduce their approach to history. The real moderns, Slavs and Tatars maintain, are those who “go into the future with an eye on the rear-view mirror,” or,


as Payam likes to explain in one of his signature arcane references: “In Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, the future is described as being behind you and the past in front of you.”

This toggling between past and present, and multiple points on the globe, dates back to the collective’s origins. Payam explains that “the name Slavs and Tatars was a brief: that we were going to focus on this area of the world, even though we were not experts on the region.” Longtime collaborators, Payam and Kasia officially formed the group in London, just before Payam moved to Moscow and Kasia moved to Arnhem, the Netherlands, to attend the residency program Werkplaats Typografie (where she was a colleague of their future collaborator, Boy). It was an organic beginning, Payam recalls, “printing things, translating things, making small editions to give to our friends, and then we started selling them. It started as a way of exchanging and sharing information with one another, almost like a reading group.”

This initial DIY impulse to educate themselves reflects the personal histories of the group’s principals. How Payam got back to his Iranian-Caucasian roots was through his interest in Russian literature and history, which took him to Moscow where he could speak Farsi in the markets and find enclaves of Caucasian cultures all over the city. Payam attributes to Kasia, who grew up in Soviet-era Poland, an important role in shaping his understanding of Islam and communism. He says that in trying to understand the political history of his family’s native Iran, he agrees with scholars Hamid Dabashi and Olivier Roy, who argue that the rise of militant Islam is linked to the fall of viable leftist strategies and ideologies. Payam notes, “All those people in the banlieus of Paris who used to be Trotskyists and left-wingers, now go into mosques. I always looked at the Iranian Revolution purely through the political spectrum. But Kasia—and this is why we collaborate—helped me to understand it through a more mystical idea of what the Iranian Revolution was about.” He continues: “All revolutions fail because you can’t promise utopia. But it’s one thing to promise utopia in this world, and another thing to promise salvation in the next world. You’re never held accountable because by the time people find out whether it’s true or not, they’re dead, so they can’t come back and vote against you.”

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. “We’ve been very interested in trying to force together two things that don’t exist in the same place, whether it’s in our tone of voice—trying to address both politics and be intimate at the same time, or using slang with academic ideas—or in combining two mutually exclusive points of view. Sufis try to do this as well. For us, it is the two monsters of Islam and communism, which hover over the area of the world that we work in, and also exist to the West as direct challenges.”

These two “monsters” lurk throughout Slavs and Tatars’ most ambitious project to date, the publication of Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve could’ve should’ve (JRP | Ringier, Zürich, 2010), an edited, and translated, reprinting of 300 cartoons from the nearly 5,000 that originally appeared in Molla Nasreddin, an early 20th-century Azeri magazine. Famed for its satirical illustrations in the manner of the 19th-century French characturist Honoré Daumier, Molla Nasreddin was published from 1906 to 1931 in the Caucasus and read from the Azeri communities in northern Iran all the way to Morocco and India. Named for the 13th-century Sufi wise-fool Nasreddin, who is still known throughout West and Central Asia for his humorous folk wisdom, the publication was launched in Tbilisi (the then-capital of Transcaucasia, which comprised present-day Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and was influential in supporting the liberal reforms of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–07). Turmoil following the Bolshevik Revolution forced the magazine to Tabriz, Iran, in 1921, and later Baku (1922–31), where it suffered under the Bolsheviks’ repressive rule until it closed. Throughout its run, the magazine offered critiques of Islam, Western

(Previous spread) naTIOnS, 2007– , digital mockup of a series of seven screen prints.

(Opposite page) TO MOUnTaIn MInOrITIES, 2009, wall painting, 31 x 450 cm. Installation view at Netwerk Center for Contemporary Art, Aalst, belgium, 2009.

(this page) a MOnOBrOW ManIFESTO (rOSTaM vS BErT), 2010, PVC, print, helium, diameter: 300 cm. Installation view at the Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010.


(this page) MOlla naSrEddIn: THE MaGaZInE THaT WOUld’vE COUld’vE SHOUld’vE, offset print, 24 x 28 cm. excerpt from artists’ book published by JrP|ringier, Zürich, 2011.

(Opposite page) Cover image of Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve could’ve should’ve.


colonialism, local corruption, restrictions on the freedom of speech and the hypocrisy of local elites, while advocating for women’s rights, education reform and Westernization.

For Slavs and Tatars, the labor was in selecting which of the cartoons to reproduce, finding translators for the various scripts, and then organizing them into thematic chapters such as “East v. West,” “Women” and “Colonialism.” In Slavs and Tatars’ compilation, each of the selected images has a brief explanation of the cartoon alongside the caption in Latinized Azeri and an English translation. A classic spread from Molla Nasreddin, reproduced in the book, shows “an educated Muslim” followed by his covered wife in the Caucasus, and “an educated Muslim and his wife in Paris” walking arm-in-arm together, and with the woman in European dress. Another cartoon shows a 12-year-old Muslim girl being married off to an old man, while a young Jewish woman goes to school.

Politically, Slavs and Tatars find much to disagree with in the magazine. They lament the ways that Westernization and modernization are still conflated both historically and presently throughout the region, as well as in the original Molla Nasreddin. In the book’s introduction, they specify their differences: “Standing squarely as a champion of secular, Western values, the weekly is in some sense a mascot, in reverse, of our practice. Where [Molla Nasreddin] is secular and pro-Western, we tend to err on the side of the mystical and remain suspicious of the wholesale import of Western modernity.” But despite their reservations about the magazine, they see value in keeping history alive to avoid the situation that one of their early poster designs spells out: “It is of utmost importance that we repeat our mistakes as a reminder to future generations of the depths of our stupidity.”

Slavs and Tatars maintain that “if you believe the kind of nonsense that passes as wisdom, that East and West are on a collision course, that Islam and Christianity are incompatible, then it makes sense to focus on an area in the world where they did successfully coexist for centuries.” The group views their place in these ongoing cultural clashes—both within the region and throughout the world—as one of “archiving or preserving or making relevant things that we feel this part of the world is in danger of losing.” Payam remarks, “Whether in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, no one cares about local folklore—everyone wants shopping malls. Not only is that folklore relevant to the West, it’s relevant to the people themselves.”

For all their investment in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Slavs and Tatars are nonetheless accused of dilettantism, and are criticized for poking ironic fun at the peoples and histories that they research. And, at times, Slavs and Tatars can appear untroubled by the hints of paternalism in their projects and professed attitudes. In the case of Molla Nasreddin, they originally stumbled across the recently reissued Azeri editions, seven volumes at 800-pages apiece, in a bookstore in Baku. I asked whether they were concerned about copyright issues, given that they had reproduced the illustrations almost wholesale. They said they were not concerned at all, and left it at that. Admittedly, much of the material is more than a century old and beyond its copyright protection (Azeri law generally provides protection for a work for 50 years from the publication date). However, for foreign researchers to “discover” and repackage archival material for export—no matter how much labor is required in the process—establishes an uneasy precedent. In certain presentations, particularly in contexts in which the figure of Molla Nasreddin and the regional history are not well known, Slavs and Tatars can give the impression that they rescued Molla Nasreddin from total obscurity and that the group itself knows, and cares, more about the regional culture than the local peoples themselves.

Payam staunchly defends Slavs and Tartars’ approach to the region’s history. “There is real affection and sincerity to what we’re doing,” he says. “It’s proven by the linguistic investment in these cultures.” He rants about unnamed expatriates in Berlin who don’t speak German, and then says, “Living in a culture and not speaking

the language is kind of like fucking a person but not kissing them.” And in their generous and informative introduction to Molla Nasreddin, Slavs and Tatars point out that “it is rare to embrace one’s antithesis, as we have with [Molla Nasreddin]: spending years translating, funding and publishing a historical media platform with which we often disagree.” If Slavs and Tatars hadn’t done the work of compiling the cartoons or used their position as sought-after cultural figures to contextualize and disseminate the regional publication to an international audience, who would have? In validation of their claims, Slavs and Tatars’ Molla Nasreddin has been well received and reviewed in publications and circles outside the art world, bringing the magazine into wider circulation.

Slavs and Tatars’ paradoxical embrace of material considered reactionary keeps them going back to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Their current research centers on the fourth holiest site in Islam, Bukhara, where they are intrigued by the syncretic, literary, mystical and even pantheistic strands of the Islam practiced there. They are focusing on the mazars, which are mausoleums on which people lay fabrics with the hope of absorbing healing energies—a blasphemous act according to the prophet Muhammad. Delving further into ideas of religious transference and heretical currents in Islam, they are currently fascinated by “mystical substitution,” a dubious concept found in the work of the early 20th-century French-Greek Catholic and Orientalist scholar Louis Massignon, who in wanting to understand Islam from within, attempted to take on the sins of others—here, true-believing Muslims, whom Massignon thought couldn’t otherwise be saved by the Christian god—in a mystical transfer of sin and suffering.

As they continue to explore these diverse interests, Slavs and Tatars will stand out in whatever context they are in—much like their adopted antihero, Molla Nasreddin, who provides a humorous analogy to Slavs and Tatars’ methodology. In a famous tale, the eccentric sage is seen passing through a town riding backward on his donkey. The villagers stop him and ask him why he is doing this. In one ending to the story, Nasreddin replies, “It’s not that I am sitting on the donkey backward, it’s the donkey that is facing the wrong way.” In another version, Nasreddin quips, “It’s not that I am sitting on the donkey backward; I’m just more interested in where I am coming from than where I am going.”

SlavS - The Third Line · by Slavs and Tatars’ well-informed, affectionate, but detached tone of...

Documents

Transcript of SlavS - The Third Line · by Slavs and Tatars’ well-informed, affectionate, but detached tone of...