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From the written word to the exhibition format, from myth to technology, Slavs and Tatars have developed a practice that spans the geographies of Eurasia to question Western models of knowledge, representation, and belonging, and to imagine art as a space in which cultural distance doesn’t necessarily need to be bridged.

Slavs and Tatars is a collective that dedicates its research and creative work to a specific geographic area: Eurasia, stretching from the former Berlin Wall to the Great Wall of China. The collective describes the people and cultures of this region by rejecting Western categorizations, as they flatten and diminish the irreducible plurality of languages, alphabets, religions, and myths that characterize it. Its practice is structured around three activities: the publication of books, exhibitions, and lecture-performances. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars founded the Pickle Bar in Berlin, a nonprofit space that hosts residency and mentorship programs for professionals from their region, a place where the sharing of food and fermented beverages fosters political discussion, activism, and contemporary art.
In this interview, we explored some central themes of their practice: the relationship between the page and the space, multilingualism and untranslatability, the crisis of the Eurocentric display, the role of the sacred and myth, the political function of humor, manual labor and craftsmanship, and the transformations brought about by artificial intelligence.

THE INTERVIEW WITH SLAVS AND TATARS 

Slavs and Tatars were originally founded in 2006 as a reading group and editorial collective, before transitioning into a visual, installation, and performative practice. How does this genesis, rooted in the written word and translation, shape your approach to conceiving the exhibition space? Do you conceive the exhibition display as an extension of the printed page, or rather as its deconstruction? 
We have long been interested in the notion of collective reading (in so far as reading has been a collective, performative, oral activity for the overwhelming majority of its duration. The idea of intimate, individual, private reading is perhaps 2-3 centuries old if that). In the first 2-3 years of Slavs and Tatars’ activities, our practice consisted solely of two dimensions: be they pamphlets, books, or posters. But inevitably, something to be read. As our work became more capacious formally, if not discursively, the exhibition making ‒ whether space-making, sculptures, or installations ‒ started to dis-articulate the very propos that the books (or later, the lecture-performances) sought to articulate.

Your visual works are often not mere images, but the three-dimensional materialization of rhetorical figures ‒ such as metaphors, allegories, and phonetic shifts ‒ that inherently belong to the realm of philology and literature. In a sense, it seems you do not ask the viewer to simply “look” at your exhibitions, but to “read” them and perform an exegesis. From a curatorial perspective, how do you navigate this transition from the textual to the three-dimensional? 
The geographic remit of S&T could be seen as a foil of sorts. Of course we are deeply interested in and invested in the region. However, the epistemological or heuristic challenges underlying our regional focus include an emphasis on other types of knowledge, beyond the analytical. To address these other orders of knowledge ‒ the affective, the phenomenological, the metaphysical, the digestive, et al ‒ we felt it necessary to move beyond the written page.  

SLAVS AND TATARS’ PRACTICE

Your mapping of Eurasia brings into dialogue distant geographies and historical legacies ‒ such as the Poland-Iran axis or the routes connecting the Caucasus to Central Asia. This approach appears driven neither by a search for universal archetypes nor by a nostalgic revival of the Soviet rhetoric of the “friendship of Nations”, but by a radical critique of the Western geopolitical and philosophical model. While European states built their modernity and geopolitical stability on the violence of homogenization and the sharp separation of borders and identities, Eurasia has remained an intrinsically complex, porous, and stratified region. From your perspective, how has this resistance to homogenization shaped Eurasian artistic languages, and how does your practice draw from it to disrupt the Eurocentric display? 
We’re not qualified to speak about artistic languages of Eurasia as we are not art historians. Nor do we aim to represent the region in any shape or form. We are more familiar with the linguistic, historical, or religious specificities of the region. Over two decades of practice, we’ve perhaps used the term decolonization once. Why? Because we’ve consistently prioritized the act of decentering historical narratives in our own research; re-directing resources to others (via our residency and mentorship program); providing a platform for other artists, writers, et al via Pickle Bar, rather than engage in polemcis surrounding these topics. In an era of collapse much like the one in which we find ourselves, we prefer to build and support institutions rather than bring them down.  
As you know, museums are facing a perfect storm of dwindling audience numbers (many have not reached pre-Covid levels 6 years later), reduced public funding, and a generational rift whereby the children of erstwhile cultural patrons are not as keen as their parents to take the mantle of supporting the arts. Our work cannot speak to the latter two challenges but the first it can and does. Which is one reason for the incredible support we’ve had from institutions over the years: while the traditional demographic (bourgeois, Christian, European heritage) of Western institutions has been dwindling for some time, there are multiple, other publics often overlooked. Our work privileges these Others if you will simply by replacing the art historical and cultural assumptions conventionally found in cultural spaces with the stories, rituals (the samovar), symbols (the Simurgh), furniture (River bed), et al from our region. Only then do we move forward with more demanding, conceptual work about language politics, the risks of excessive secular rage, etc.      

Much of your work aims to dismantle the dualisms typical of Western Cartesian thought. To achieve this, you frequently invoke the “metaphysical split” and the use of humor (as embodied by the figure of Molla Nasreddin). In an art world that often aspires to be global and accessible, your work seems to reclaim the right to opacity, accepting that certain references or linguistic plays may not be immediately shareable. If a work of art forgoes full transparency, what responsibility does it then assume toward the audience? What does it mean for you to communicate without necessarily making everything comprehensible? 
We often return to the distinction Siah Armajani made in an interview with the late Calvin Tomkins in a 1993 New Yorker interview between the accessible and the available. Like Armajani, we aim to make our work as available as possible. For example, we dedicate considerable thought to the mediation of an art work alongside if not prior to its conception. However, accessibility depends on how much you invest, to borrow the language of the asset class. The more you put in, the more you get out.
Let’s talk the example of multilingualism in our work. For the 58^th Venice Biennale, in the Central Pavilion we exhibited a series of 15 vacuum formed panels (in a clear nod to Broodthaers) called Tranny Tease (pour Marcel), each featuring a text written in an alphabet not suited to it. There were some 8-9 languages (Georgian, Russian, German, Boxori, Arabic) and 4-5 alphabets (Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic, Uighur, Hebrew). Both sides of the argument could be made: on one hand, the proliferation of languages and alphabets is an earnest attempt to make the work more available (not to mention beyond the Anglophone world); on the other, the decision not to include any English text betrays that very intention.

Do you believe art should reduce the distance between cultures or, conversely, teach us to inhabit that distance without pretending to fully bridge it? 
The latter. As you can imagine, Emily Apter and Barbara Cassin’s work on this topic – that of untranslatabilty – resonates greatly with us. 

MYTH, FAITH AND INSTITUTIONS

In your work, the sacred, mysticism, and religion do not appear as remnants of the past, but as living apparatuses of cultural production. In an art system that remains deeply secularized, what does it mean to restore epistemological dignity to these forms of knowledge without turning them into mere aesthetics? 
If art has any pretense left to be political, it must acknowledge the significant role faith has played in the upheavals and civil disobedience movements of the last century: from the Baptism of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in the US to Mahatma Gandhi’s Hinduism in the Indian Independence Movement to Islam in the Iranian Revolution to the role of the Catholic Church as arbiter during Poland’s Solidarnosc. 

In your exhibition and curatorial project Handdschob at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, opening on 4 October 2026, you dialogue with the historical avant-garde of Die Brücke, placing craft, manual labor, and its social, folkloric, and even sexual implications at the center. Why has it become urgent today for a collective with such a markedly conceptual and editorial approach to interrogate craftsmanship and manual practice? 
At risking of being blunt, to counter the excessively sentimental ideas and people surrounding crafts in recent years. The title of the exhibition, “Handdschob”, is a deliberate play on the German word for craft or skilled trade, “Handwerk” (for further reading on the unwieldy transliteration of [dz] in German as ‘dsch’ see “Deepthroat Dipthongs,” in Slavs and Tatars, Wripped Scripped (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2018). More than merely a skill in making things by hand, “Handwerk” represents a pillar of the German economy, a deeply regulated professional sector, and a recognized social class. What our exhibition, and its rather sultry title, offer is an opportunity to excavate the mess, the grit, and the grind behind often idealized notions of craftsmanship.  

THE TIME OF RESEARCH ACCORDING TO SLAVS AND TATARS

In your series of works Hang Don’t Cut, you embedded “captcha” codes within the biological veins of melons, juxtaposing bot-tracking technology with the Eurasian legend that sees the rind of this fruit as a form of divine, ciphered writing. While the Large Language Models (LLMs) underpinning AI digest, translate, and standardize global language based on statistical probability, your practice celebrates phonetic error, intuition, mysticism, and the “productive misunderstanding”. What do you see as the greatest risks and dangers of this technological turn, and in which specific realms ‒ cultural, linguistic, cognitive, or political ‒ do you believe these threats are manifesting most alarmingly?
Perhaps we’re not as alarmed as we should be, or as many of our colleagues are. We’ve tried over the last two decades to take the long view – never addressing frontally the issues of our day. So it follows that we remain to be convinced that artificial intelligence will change the nature of those things art has been tasked to reveal ‒ the wondrous, the numinous, the holy – when as of 2026 automatic soap dispensers still cannot detect the skin of darker-skinned people.

In your work, you use the concept of fermentation as a process of transformation where decomposition does not equate to loss, but rather becomes an opportunity for preservation and the generation of new forms. This idea also seems to reflect your way of working through long-term research cycles. Can we consider fermentation a methodology of your practice? How does this approach influence the development of your research and artistic production?
Yes, we often speak about yoghurt when discussing our methodology. To make yoghurt, one needs yoghurt. There’s definitely an element of totum simul, the whole is in the parts and the part in the whole. Is transliteration the content of our work or its modus operandi or both? What these research cycles allow, however, is a type of knowledge production against the increased acceleration of our times and our industry. 

Your most recent work cycle, Simurgh Self-Help, draws inspiration from The Conference of the Birds, the famous Persian mystical poem in which thirty birds embark on a spiritual journey through seven valleys to find the Simurgh, ultimately discovering that the king they sought resides within themselves. In your exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, you used this allegorical framework to reorganize and reinterpret your entire body of previous work. What did you discover about your own practice by adopting the Simurgh as a lens through which to observe your past?
It’s too early to say. Can we get back to you in a decade with this question?

Alice Longo

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