Slavs and Tatars: Pt I

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER
By Andrew Maerkle


“Mirrors for Princes: Both Sides of the Tongue,” installation view at NYU Abu Adhabi Art Gallery, 2015. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Slavs and Tatars.

Formed in 2006, Slavs and Tatars is a multi-disciplinary collective that makes publications, installations, performance-lectures and other projects developing out of research into the “area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia.” Appropriate to such a far-ranging remit, the group recovers and makes visible the repressed histories of cross-cultural exchange and linguistic divergences – and standardizations – that have subtly shaped our world today.

Identifying the meeting points of the body, language and ideology, their installations combine esoteric knowledge with immediate sensual engagement. Made for the 8th Berlin Biennale, the sound installation Ezan Çılgıŋŋŋŋŋları (2014), for example, investigated the attempt to translate the Islamic call to prayer from Arabic to Turkish as part of Ataturk’s reforms following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. It took the shape of two massive speakers, playing a computer-generated recording of the Turkish call to prayer, set into a grassy knoll at a v-angle evoking the form of the rahlé, or reading stand for Islamic holy books. Although relatively few visitors could understand the full implications of what they were hearing, all were invited to linger and recline upon the speakers while listening to the sounds. Other projects include Beyonsense (2012), made for Projects 98 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The installation required visitors to pass through a wall of hanging carpets to enter a space of mystic-modernist contemplation – a darkened room with benches on either side and, glowing green above, a recreation of a light sculpture created by Dan Flavin in 1982 for the Masjid al-Farah mosque in New York.

While the group has been gaining increasing visibility at international exhibitions like the 10th Sharjah Biennale (2011), the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the 7th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2012), publications are still perhaps the core of their practice. Filled with reproductions of the boldly drawn, sharp-witted cartoons for which it was known, their book on the early 20th-century Azeri satirical journal Molla Nasreddin, Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (2011), is a powerful document of an under-appreciated intellectual milieu that emerged at a time and place where different religions, ethnicities, languages, empires, and progressive and dogmatic thinking intersected. Their most recent book, Mirrors for Princes (2015), complements a cycle of works and exhibitions of the same name inspired by 12th-century Turkic political advice literature, but instead of explicating the works, the essays by different writers and specialists collected in the book add up to a polemic on the dynamic between political commentary and faith in contemporary society.

Slavs and Tatars have yet to exhibit in Japan, but they recently visited Tokyo to participate in the annual conference of CiMAM (The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art), where they were among presenters addressing the theme, “How Global Can Museums Be?” ART iT met with the collective prior to the conference to learn more about their work.

The CiMAM 2015 Annual Conference: “How Global Can Museums Be?” was held November 7-9 at multiple venues in Tokyo.

I.


“Qit Qat Qlub,” installation view, Preis der Nationalgalerie 2015, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2015. Photo David von Becker.

ART iT: I’m not sure whether it ever took the form of a work as such, but there’s a quote that shows up in one of your texts that struck me: “We know we will fail, but try our damnedest to succeed nonetheless.” This quote is of particular resonance to Japan today, where the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has been enacting increasingly authoritarian and unconstitutional policies in spite of widespread popular opposition. It describes the situation perfectly. Could you explain the genesis of this idea, and discuss how it relates to the expanded context of today?

S&T: The quote stems from a Nowruz card that we made in 2009 on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. It was based on a Russian illustration that came out around the time of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. The card showed a picture of Scaevola, cutting his right arm off, based on the Roman who famously burnt his right hand as a show of bravery. On the card was written: “Better to administer the pain ourselves than have others do so in our place.” For us, the financial crisis of 2008 made evident the end of a modernist model of time that looks forward to the future and turns its back to the past. This is a positivist view of time: we imagine we can control and see the future, and somehow the past is irrelevant. But, if anything, 2008 showed that we have no idea what the future really entails.
Our oft-cited geographic remit – between the former Berlin Wall and Great Wall of China – is not only a political geography. It’s also an imaginary or poetic geography. Part of that entails redeeming, or rescuing, or reactivating certain thought patterns of the peoples who live there. The fatalism of the quote you mention is a very Slavic idea. When you know you might not succeed, there’s an emotional roller coaster of waking up everyday thinking it’s your first day and knowing it’s your last at the same time. It can be quite a cynical position. Either you don’t do anything, or you do everything, but it’s coupled with this extreme naiveté or suspension of disbelief.
So, reflecting on the five or six years that have passed since we first used this quote, it’s hard not to want to retire within a more esoteric, withdrawn line of thinking. That’s something that constantly tempts us. I recently read a quote by Pierre Huyghe in which he said that if you start to make work about things you don’t like, about the problems of the world, then in some sense you’re extending that energy, by virtue of the fact that you’re making work embedded with that which you dislike. So then the question becomes, how do you address the world we live in, which is compounded by the rubble of all these failures around us?
When you look at what’s happening in Russia, the Middle East or Europe, change fundamentally has to happen not only from the bottom up, but also from the inside out. We’re still clearly caught up in this idea that it can be ideological, it can be top down, it can be outside in, and I think that’s the residue of the 20th century. I think what allows change from the inside out is a more metaphysical approach to politics: taking the long view of politics, but also metaphysical in the sense of imagining a wholly other – and holy other – way of being.
We’ve been increasingly interested in probing what the French Catholic priest and translator Charles de Foucauld called “secular rage.” France is the perfect example of this. To what extent do we whitewash and blind ourselves to the role that faith plays and must play as a progressive agency? Look at all the examples of the 20th-century civil disobedience movements – Solidarność in Poland, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, you name it: faith played an incredibly strong role in all of them, and yet we as intellectuals or artists appropriate them as secular figures and civil leaders. We conveniently forget that their struggles were deeply rooted in their faith. We don’t know what to do with that as intellectuals and artists. We think that’s for others, and not for ourselves. As uncomfortable as it may be, that’s something we have to engage with now.

ART iT: Certainly in the case of Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of the most progressive reformers and educators were Christian. Perhaps in a way similar to the case of Islam in Central Asia, a religion that can be hierarchical and dogmatic within its entrenched power base can be reinvented when it is brought some place else.

S&T: We are constantly reminded of the extent to which belief systems, or ideologies, or even empires can be progressive or syncretic at their edges. It’s really the core that is rotten in some sense.
We just came from Hong Kong, where we were doing research on the translation of Islam in China at Asia Art Archive. In 17th-century China, Islam was translated for the first time into a foreign intellectual tradition: namely, the Confucian idiom. People don’t usually translate terms like sharia or ummah, but in China they were translated into the Confucian idea of li, or ritual. The oppression of Islam in Xinjiang is a political issue, related to the Uighur minority as opposed to the faith per se. In fact, you could argue that in some ways Islam in China is more progressive than in its more traditional stomping grounds, such as the Middle East. For example, there are female imams, which is unheard of or at least very rare in the rest of the Muslim world. The separation of genders during prayer is also not so strict. Most importantly, there is a syncretic approach to the faith. What’s compelling about syncretism is that it’s not just a mixture of spaces. It’s also a mixture or palimpsest of time, because you’re necessarily incorporating other beliefs that either predated or followed yours.


Left: Zulf (brunette) (2014), oak wood, hair, 82 x 50 x 30 cm. Photo Gunter Lepkowski, courtesy Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Right: Mother Tongues and Father Throats (2012), woolen yarn, 500 x 300 cm. Installation view, Nouveau Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Below: Reading room, Kiosk, Ghent, 2011.
 

ART iT: So what does it mean when you put a rahlé in an exhibition space? Are you trying to juxtapose or insert religion into the historically secular space of the gallery?

S&T: It’s not really about religion. Rather, it’s more trying to suggest a different relationship to time and to being, a different phenomenology of some sort. Next year it will have been 10 years since Slavs and Tatars was founded, so we’re starting to look back and think about these milestones. Despite having spent time in major centers of learning in the US and Europe, you realize that whatever school you’re studying at, whether it’s Heidelberg or Harvard, or Oxford or the Sorbonne, all these universities essentially ascribe to a very similar line of thought, which is an Enlightenment, positivist line of history. We’re not talking just about the provincialism of universities that have departments for British Studies, German Studies, and then “Asian Studies.” We’re talking about an entire way of thinking about and approaching knowledge.
The rahlé is not just for reading the Quran but also for the Hadiths and other sacred texts. It calls to mind the idea of collective reading. That’s something we feel it is important to re-engage. For most of its history, reading has been a collective practice, not a private one. You could say the private book as such is really only about 150 years old. The idea of collective reading doesn’t necessarily mean actually reading together, but reading as a group or as a body of multiples, and that’s what the rahlé intimates. It’s usually used in public space, where either you as an individual or a sheikh would read from it, kind of like a human microphone – like at Occupy Wall Street, when someone would speak and then another person would project it back louder. And of course it has to do with the idea of how we can consider text as something other than an analytical process or hermeneutic experience. Think of the Kabbalists. Ninety percent of Kabbalists don’t understand Aramaic, they scan the letters. Khlebnikov, the Russian Futurist, believed in an internal declension of letters: that there is a rhyme and reason for the succession of letters which make up our words. There is also language as a form of sacred practice, or ecstatic language. It’s not always transactional. It’s not always about conveying information. Language can obfuscate as much as clarify. So the rahlé suggests this. It’s one idiom. There are others as well.

ART iT: You also use the rahlé as a kind of modular, sculptural form, along with the takht [a form of raised, communal seating similar to the traditional Chinese daybed], and the carpet itself, which even in its originary usage is a modular form that can map or demarcate space. In your exhibitions, what is the dynamic between something as a signifier and something as a form, something as meaningful and something as modular?

S&T: We rarely think about our work as art. There’s obviously a high level of articulation in our work, but it’s the articulation about the subject matter that matters to us, and there’s relatively little reflection about what it means as a signifier and a form. We don’t consider the takht to be a work, because it’s a vernacular architecture. It’s not ours. We use it as scenography. It’s a space of seating that is not individually denominative. There’s no you or me. There’s always four or five or three. So we think about our works more as props than as signifiers, in the sense that we always think about it as going elsewhere. It’s a platform for other thoughts.
You could say the artworks are in some way props for bringing people back to the books, or just for allowing them to sit differently, for example. This applies to the carpets, too. The carpet is such a rich material. It is modular as a signifying practice. It’s like a totum simul, the whole is in the part and the part is in the whole. But as a signifier in itself? We’re aware of it in the sense that we choose certain types of carpets, often Turkic, or even machine made, which in the Middle East are not even considered real carpets. But a lot of our carpet work is not looking at the carpet as an art form per se, but as a prop. Not because we don’t believe the carpet is an art form, but for us it’s not the end.


The Squares and Circurls of Justice (2014), steel, cotton turbans, polyester hats, 170 x 600 x 40 cm. Installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich.

ART iT: What’s your attitude toward fabrication – both in terms of having something produced for you by a craftsman or company, and also in terms of creating lies or untruths?

S&L: It was necessitated by an economy of means, but we began very modestly, and still are very modest. We started out with 200-euro budgets for printing six-page pamphlets. As it grew, we continued to work only rarely with people who make art. Most of the times we work with craftsmen. What’s important about this is that even though a craftsman may have an incredible sophistication within a certain trade, asking someone to do something beyond his/her specialty requires a certain surrender. We often defer to them. It’s also about respect. They are our elders. You don’t go to a craftsman and say, I want you to do this, because the calligrapher or the suzani needlework guy has been doing it for years. What’s interesting about craft is that it’s one of the few examples today where innovation is decoupled from individualism. The emphasis is not on you the individual as a craftsman. It’s about innovation through tradition as opposed to against tradition, as our colleague Hammad Nassar says. You copy your master for 10 years before you dare to make a variation. This is something into which we try to inscribe ourselves. The surrender means that you never get exactly what you imagined. And that’s fine.
It’s important that we give up control of the outcome. We hope that contributes to the sense of generosity in the work. What we mean by “generosity” is that we live in a moment of zeitgeist for art, and there’s a glut of visual art, so there are these codes that are obvious from a mile away – whether it’s the lighting or the white walls or the preciousness – that say, this is a piece of art and you are supposed to engage with it in this particular way. You don’t have that preciousness when you work with craftsmen, and that allows certain openings for people to access the work.
When Juan Gaitán invited us to participate in the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014, we thought that given our interest in narrative and research, the next logical step for building upon our publications and lecture-performances would be to do a film or video. Juan pushed back. He said, I wouldn’t do a film if I were you, because the strength of your work right now is that people don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know whether it’s true or fictive, sacred or profane, whether they should sit on it or view it from afar. So it’s important that we maintain this aspect of not knowing. And it’s not just others not knowing. We ourselves don’t know with certain pieces. Like the hat rack from the “Mirrors for Princes” cycle, The Squares and Circurls of Justice (2014). When we exhibit it, the staff of the institution invariably ask us, can people remove the hats? We don’t know what to answer. The work is about the removal of headdresses and the intimacy that disrobing implies, whatever culture you’re in. In Islam, you always put on a headdress or a veil, so the work signals a different type of space. It’s not a space of ragingly secular contemporary art. That’s why our installations are always warm, there are often carpets – not just Persian carpets but even office carpeting – the lighting is different, the seating is different. But I wouldn’t say it’s a fabrication, which implies that we’re pulling the strings.
Recently we’ve been thinking about the three axes of our practice – the publications, exhibitions and lectures – and trying to understand what they mean vis-à-vis each other. Basically, the publications and lectures articulate things. The books are not art books in the strict sense. They are pretty straightforward. They are not absurdist. They are not concrete poetry. They are clearly written. So if they articulate something, then what does the artwork do? For Slavs and Tatars, the job of the artwork is to disarticulate. Disarticulate of course does not mean to not articulate: it means undoing an articulation. In French you have this phrase brouiler les pistes, muddying the water, or covering your tracks. Like when you’re looking for a trace in the water and someone stirs it up, then you lose the trace. That’s what the artwork should do: lose the trace of the art work both as an artist (how you got here) and as the public (where it’s going).

I | II

Slavs and Tatars: The Other Side of the River

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