Slavs and Tatars

The art collective from Berlin describes itself as a faction using polemics and intimacies, and dedicates itself to the region known as Eurasia that is east of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China. Working transculturally and using historical research equipped with the charms of pop art, they produce publications, exhibits and lecture performances. Slavs & Tatars, who have had solo shows in the MoMa in New York, in the Secession in Vienna and the Kunsthalle Zurich, were nominated for the 2015 National Gallery Prize in Berlin. REVERSE JOY (2012) examines the Shiite ritual of Muharram, practiced for 13 centuries, as a ritual protest movement and counterpart to Carnival: »…the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of roles of men and women; and joy through mourning all demand an equally elastic and muscular understanding of the sacred and profane that is the down payment towards any meaningful social change.«