Slavs & Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Self Management Body, 2011. Courtesy the artists Slavs and Tatars
Slavs and Tatars is an art collective that was founded in 2006. It produces a wide variety of works in different media and disciplines, such as installations, lecture-performances, sculptures, and publications. The collective is committed to contemplating the similarities between the belief systems and rituals of the peoples in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Slavs and Tatars started out as a reading group in 2006 when the group lived and traveled throughout the region. Exploring the region’s historical narratives and transnational relationships, the collective uses an unconventional research-based approach and designs wildly different projects to relay their findings, combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures in the process. The collective’s first two cycles looked at the Caucasus and Iran/Poland, respectively. The current cycle, The Faculty of Substitution,(since 2012) looks at a range of topics including language politics, syncretism, and the medieval genre of advice literature called mirrors for princes.
