The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

How did Slavs and Tatars come to focus on the region ‘east of the Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China’? We began as a reading group — Oprah meets Attila the Hun, if you will — translating into English previously inaccessible texts and publishing out-of-print material. We’ve since expanded to include sculpture, installation and performance. But we try to maintain the spirit of sharing and exchange that is part and parcel of our origins: the act of reading together . To do so, we have taken to redeeming a space for contemplation, reflection and exchange that is — contrary to what one would expect — often missing from the physical spaces of art. We founded Slavs and Tatars in 2006 for equally intellectual and intimate reasons. We are interested in researching an area of the world — Eurasia — which we consider politically, culturally and spiritually relevant. If we are to counter the noise which, too often, passes as wisdom — that the East and West are somehow incompatible, that Islam cannot integrate modernity — then it makes sense to look at a region where the two have coexisted for centuries (whether the Caucasus, Balkans or Central Asia). We take issue with various ideas: the positivism that seems to be so rampant in the West, the pragmatic nature of knowledge versus the experiential nature of wisdom, the idolisation of youth coupled with the dismissal of age, an excessive emphasis on the rational at the expense of the mystical, the segregation of children from adults at social functions, disproportionate attention to the individual over the collective, and splitting dinner bills. A central interest in your work is language. This is often expressed through humour: slogans, word play and jokes. Is this because they are such popular forms? Humour is a seductive tool. We think making people laugh is perhaps one of the most important, most generous things one can do. On the one hand, these performative acts on the text are part of the research itself: the process of coming to terms with the words in all their polyphonic glory. On the other, our revision of texts speaks of a struggle with language itself. We share a suspicion of the written word — its ability to produce knowledge is perhaps matched only by a certain inability to convey meaning — and of prose with Sufis and poets, respectively. Your work in APT7, Prayway , is from your most recent series titled ‘The Faculty of Substitution’. Can you discuss this concept? Today, we not only need intellectual acrobatics, but metaphysical ones. Substitution requires us to cultivate the agility, coordination and balance necessary to tell one tale through another, to adopt the innermost thoughts, experiences, beliefs and sensations of others as our own , in an effort to challenge the very notion of distance as the shortest length between two points. To understand contemporary Iran, we looked at Poland and Solidarność ( Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz 2011); to grasp the nature of political agency today, we study Muharram and the 1300-year-old Shi’ite ritual of perpetual protest ( Reverse Joy 2012); to demystify Islam, we turn to Communism ( Not Moscow Not Mecca 2012). Similarly, to engage the book, we’ve turned to the sculpture or the object. Within art, too often the book is considered documentation of a show, an afterthought. For Slavs and Tatars, everything begins with the book and returns to the book. PrayWay 2012 offers a contemplative, collective seating arrangement. Halfway between a rahlé (a holy book stand) and a takht (the riverbeds found across Central Asia and Iran), PrayWay embeds the notion and locus of discourse within its very form. You often take traditional forms and combine them with contemporary design. Can you talk more about this approach? We believe in the urgency of resuscitating history, and craftsmanship remains one of the most effective means to do so. For Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz , we creolised traditional pagan and Catholic crafts from Poland with Shi’a crafts from Muharram as one way to highlight the unlikely shared heritage of two countries in search of self-determination. Mash-ups and amphibology (occupying both ends of the spectrum at once) help make the historical contemporary and relevant to people who might otherwise consider our interest in a region arcane or obscure. So we often try to bring together things previously considered incommensurate or antithetical within the same space, be it spirituality with humour or geopolitically with pop, as with the neon lights under PrayWay , recalling customised car culture. We use the word ‘resuscitation’ for a reason: its sensuality, the idea of breathing life into a subject — by placing one’s lips on the mouth of the area of study, if you will — points to an affective relationship with an idea or a text. Interviewed by Russell Storer, September 2012. SLAVS AND TATARS An interview 249