From orientalist theory to advice for princes, London-based Central Asian artists Slavs and Tatars list five books that have inspired their artistic practice.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Molla Nasreddin: The Antimodern’ (installation view), 2012, fibreglass, weather-resistant paint, steel, 157 x 165 x 88 cm. 9th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, Korea. Image courtesy the artists.
Slavs and Tatars, founded in 2006, define themselves as “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”, otherwise known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans various media, disciplines and, as they say, “a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians.”
They have had solo exhibitions at the MoMA, New York, group exhibitions at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, as well as the Sharjah Biennale, Gwangju Biennial and Mercosul Biennial. In 2013, their work was part of “Love me Love Me Not“, the Central Asian pavillion at the Venice Biennale.
Literature and text influence Slavs and Tatars, and the collective has published several books, including Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), Not Moscow Not Mecca (Revolver/Secession, 2012), Khhhhhhh (Mousse/Moravia Gallery, 2012), Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (Book Works, 2013) as well as their translation of the legendary Azeri satire Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP-Ringier, 2011).
Art Radar asked Slavs and Tatars for the five books which have had the greatest impact on their art practice and philosophy.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Kitab Kebab’, in “Too Much Tłumacz,” 2012, Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland. Image courtesy the artists.
Wisdom of Royal Glory: A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes by Yusuff Khass Hajib, translation by Robert Dankoff
A form of political writing (often called advice literature) shared by Christian and Muslim lands, in particular during the Middle Ages but also with notable examples in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the mirrors for princes attempted to elevate statecraft (dawla) to the same level as faith or religion (din). These guides for future rulers address the delicate balance between seclusion and society, spirit and state, echoes of which we continue to find in the United States, Europe and the Middle East several centuries later.
Found in Ottoman Turkey, Persia and Central Asia (Seljuk, Samanid and Ghazvanid Khorasan), the mirrors for princes resonate with our practice in so far as they bring together in one volume several disciplines (political science, mysticism, astrology, folk tales) otherwise considered incommensurate. The mirrors for princes genre also skewers contemporary society, with its incontinent interest in self-help books, addressing this very need for advice literature, only on a more macro, sustainable if not community-focused scale: through the prism of an entire nation.
Written in Kashgar in the eleventh century, Yusuf Khass Hajib’s Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom of Royal) is a work in the medieval mirrors-for-princes genre but written in exquisite verse. The book aimed to put Turkic ideas of statecraft and literature on an equal footing with its counterparts in the Arabic and Persian traditions (interestingly enough, the reverse if similar gesture to Romanisation itself). Its importance is difficult to overstate: Kutadgu Bilig is to Turkish what Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is to Persian, Beowulf to English, or even The Iliad to Greek.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Mother Tongues and Father Throats’, 2013, wool, yarn, 300 x 500 cm. In “Book Machine”, installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy the artists.
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis by Norman Brown
Brown famously brought Sigmund Freud to bear on the Gospel, William Blake and Karl Marx before his real coup — reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake through the sura of the Qur’an (“Joyce quotes the title of exactly 111 of the 114 suras of the Qu’ran”). Before the early twentieth century and before the arrival of Finnegan’s Wake in particular, Brown claims it was impossible for a Westerner to read the Qur’an. Only through the similar confusion of characters, the similarly unyielding dictums of Joyce’s modernist mountain could one begin to understand the holy book of Mohammed.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘PrayWay’, 2012, silk and wool carpet, MDF, steel, neon, 390 x 280 x 50 cm. Image courtesy Benoit Pailley and New Museum.
Russia’s Own Orient by Vera Tolz
Tolz’s book offers a compelling counterpoint to the often monolithic Saidian discourse on orientalism, by focusing on Russian and Eastern European studies of the East. Essentially ‘eastern’ or Russian or Soviet orientalism differed from Said’s object of investigation (namely French and English) in three fundamental ways:
Much of this was due to the fact that Russian Orientalist scholarship had its origins in German Orientalism, which had always been more removed from politics than its European counterparts (often studying ‘dead’ languages or ancient civilisations) not to mention their comparatively limited imperial outreach.
Anwar Abdel-Malek, who ascribed to the above distinction ‘black’ or ‘white Russian’ and ‘western’ orientalism, anticipated Said by some fifteen years and influenced the latter. In any case, Said’s book came out in 1979, and its coincidence with the Iranian Revolution resulted inadvertently in a sudden and significant loss of resources or funding for any kind of scholarship related to the Middle East and Muslim lands, for fear of being singled out as an Orientalist or simply because the royal patronage of Iran had disappeared.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Monobrow Manifesto’, 2010, PVC, print, helium, 300 cm Ø. Frieze Sculpture Park, London. Image courtesy the artists.
On Translation by Paul Ricoeur
All of 66 pages, this small booklet packs a punch on the idea of translation as a form of linguistic hospitality. Ricoeur’s look at translation as “a point of commerce–if not always a resolution–between ostensibly irreconcilable viewpoints” resonates immensely with our practice, with what we call the metaphysical splits, the ability to bring together the seemingly mutually exclusive or antithetical, all the more urgent in our increasingly partisan age.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Qit Qat Qa’, 2013, mirrored plexiglass, fibreglass, steel, 146 x 70 x 50 cm. Image courtesy Orestis Argiropoulos and Art Space Pythagorion.
My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen
My Past and Thoughts, an eight-volume autobiography, has become a quiet benchmark of the art of recollection. The differing scale of tragedy – whether his son’s premature death or the failure of the 1848 revolutions – is not approached with pincers or shelved but explored intimately, with a sense of urgency in his very language. Herzen has been almost entirely eclipsed by his contemporary Marx, whose categorical and highly structural thought has been more actionable than Herzen’s preference for subtlety, sophistication and contradiction. If you’ve got an MBA, Marx is your man. Everyone else, turn to Herzen.
Slavs and Tatars, ‘Reverse Joy’, 2012, enamel basin, tiles, spray-paint, pigment, fountain. Installation view, “Projects 98”, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image courtesy the artists.
C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia
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Related topics: Central Asian artists, lists, art groups, art and books
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