The Eurasian art collective reimagines symbols of power through forgotten myths. As their recent Simurgh Self-Help exhibition at Warsaw’s Raster Gallery demonstrates, Slavs and Tatars are intent on translating not only languages but entire cultural narratives—from Persian epics to Soviet-altered alphabets—into tools for critique, humor, and healing.
It’s what you’d expect from a member of the linguistically inclined, rhizomatic organism that is Slavs and Tatars, a platform he co-founded with partner Kasia Korczak. Alongside collaborators Stan de Natris, and Pickle Bar directors Anastasia Marukhina and Patricia Couvet, the collective focuses on the geographical region the group famously refers to as the area “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” Since its inception in 2006, Slavs and Tatars has published several books, presented numerous solo exhibitions and lecture-performances, and participated in countless group shows. They’ve shown their work in major institutions in New York, London, Paris, São Paulo, Gwangju, Abu Dhabi, as well as all across their focus region, like the Georgian city of Tbilisi and Azerbaijan’s capital Baku in the Caucasus. Slavs and Tatars’ eclectic and esoteric purview encompasses a wide range of topics, from the unlikely connections between the Iranian Revolution and the Polish Solidarity movement to the cross-cultural reach of the Turkic-Persian myth of the Simurgh.
“It’s considered to be a bird which has seen the destruction of the world three times over,” explains Sharifi, about the phoenix-like namesake of Slavs and Tatars’ recent Simurgh Self-Help exhibition at Warsaw’s Raster Gallery. “It only exists in the next world. You only get to see Simurgh once you reach the nirvana state of oneness, with unity with your environment. You cancel your ego, in some sense.”
Inspired by Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne – Département des Aigles, the collective had resolved to apply the legendary creature to this pioneering work of institutional critique from the late-60s and early-70s, in an effort to extend the work’s analysis to a contemporary “Eurasian” context. “He fascinates us for many reasons. One is that, of course, he was a writer until very late in his life, and he only became an artist in his mid-forties,” says Sharifi, who similarly started out in publishing before moving into visual art later in his career. “He died very young, but he was constantly questioning the relationship between the image and language… He essentially took this idea of the eagle as a western symbol of empire or power and did several iterations of this show, including one that assembled all the eagles, everything he could find, from book stands to ornate flags to postcards. It was really kind of a tongue-in-cheek notion of a fictive museum where no real works were being shown.” As one of the few artists Slavs and Tatars explicitly reference in their work, the collective decided to reinterpret Broodthaers’s hegemonic eagle through the divine and enlightened Simurgh. “We thought, ‘How do we translate tradition into another tradition? How do we translate cultural idioms into other cultural idioms? How do we translate a craft into another craft?’ And here the idea was, ‘How do we translate this bird into another one, and what would be the eagle for our region?’”
In taking Broodthaers’s critique beyond his Western-centric perspective through the central symbol of twelfth-century Persian poet and mystic Farid ud-Din Attar’s epic The Conference of the Birds, Slavs and Tatars noticed something almost uncanny. “The more we looked at this parallel, we realized that the ego’s always macho. If you think about it, it’s always a male ego. You never see a female ego. It’s such a shorthand for nationalism, masculinity—the American eagle; the Russian eagle; the German eagle.” The Turko-Persianate Simurgh, on the other hand, represents something far loftier. “It’s not of this world but the next. It’s not macho but in some sense genderfluid,” explains Sharifi, before going on to recount the popular story, where the hoopoe leads a group of birds on a quest to find their king in search of spiritual enlightenment. “They pass the threshold of the gate, and Simurgh is not there. There’s only a pond where they see their own reflection. It’s a very Sufi idea that God is not something external to you; transcendence is within you yourself. It’s also a play on words because in Persian si morgh literally means ‘thirty birds.’”
It’s surely this idea of oneness that is of interest to Slavs and Tatars, particularly at a time so fractured by war and border conflicts. “With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it’s become for us even more imperative to find areas of commonality,” says Sharifi, who argues for the pursuit of a non-imperial mode of regional accord. “It’s easy to identify how we’re different. It’s easy to identify what differentiates a Kazakh from a Ukrainian; a Georgian from a Pole. That’s obvious. But what’s much more difficult is finding areas of commonality that’s not top down; that’s not Moscow-centric; that’s not imperial; that’s not shoved down our throats.” Along with the Slavic Harvest festival known in Poland as dożynki, the pająki straw decorations, and the papercutting art of wyczinanki, Slavs and Tatars believe that the Simurgh is another one of these “bottom up” cross-cultural traditions that unite us. “What was really interesting was that I knew about Simurgh as a Persian Turkic phenomenon, but the Westernmost iteration of Simurgh we found in our research was in Chernihiv in central Ukraine. Even that is an interesting way to think about the so-called ‘divide’ between East and West: How come there is no Simurgh in Poland?”
Identified as the Pre-Christian Slavic god Simargl—before Vladimir the Great converted the medieval state of Kievan Rus to Christianity in the tenth century—this East Slavic analogue to the Simurgh is what Sharifi describes as a more interesting way to define a “fault line” that isn’t imposed by the state. “We’re really not into nationalities; national boundaries,” he declares. “We find it all just boring, and that’s why we like to talk about language groups. I don’t want to talk about Turkey, but when I say ‘Turkic,’ then, all of a sudden, it’s much more interesting, because it goes from Xinjiang all the way to Bulgaria.”
For someone who first encountered Slavs and Tatars’ work in the metaphorical “flesh” at the armory-come-museum of Galeria Arsenał in Białystok a decade ago, it’s also intriguing to think of the city—as well as the art collective itself—in terms of being located at its own unique cultural and historical faultline. The regional capital is located in the Podlachia voivodeship, where the West Slavs of northeast Poland meet the East Slavs of Belarus, as well as the greatest concentration of the Turkic ethnic group, known as Tatars, in Poland. “I remember the space and the city very well,” says Sharifi about The Pure Tongue group show inspired by the universal international language of Esperanto, invented by local nineteenth-century scholar L. L. Zamenhof. “Let’s say it was before you could hear Russian everywhere in Poland. The only place you could hear it was Białystok, and now of course you can hear it everywhere,” he continues, alluding to the displacement of millions of Ukrainians to the Central European country since the escalation of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022. “It’s so fantastic to see and hear Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian everywhere. It’s sad that it has come at this cost.”
It wouldn’t be the first time in modern history that a war has triggered mass migration of communities and ethnic groups across Eastern Europe either. In 2021, Slavs and Tatars’ LONG LVIVE LVIV/СЛАВА ЗА БРЕСЛАВА exhibition at Wrocław’s Oppenheim Gallery explored the dramatic relocations triggered by the post-war border changes established by the Allies in 1945. The major city known as Lwów was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to become Lviv, and its Polish citizens were expelled and resettled in newly acquired Western territories, including Germany’s Breslau (now Poland’s Wrocław). “When this population transfer happened after the Second World War, the faculty members in most of the departments of Lviv University were the founding faculty of the same departments in Wrocław. They kind of leapfrogged over,” says Sharifi, noting another curious change that came with the enforced territorial adjustments. “One of the few departments that didn’t make it and was sort of sacrificed to this population transfer was the Oriental Studies department. It’s hearsay, but is it because it was no longer the eastern frontier of the West, so they didn’t need it anymore?”
In returning to the subject in Chicago the following year with MERCZbau, Slavs and Tatars’ exhibition of merchandise dedicated to the defunct Department of Oriental Studies was a poignant reflection on the shifting meanings of the East–West dichotomy in light of the more recent mass migration of Ukrainians and Belarusians to Poland. “It’s sad that it’s taken the destruction of one country and the oppression of another, but can you imagine that Poland was on the way to being the end of the gene pool?” While the Allies hoped to prevent future territorial disputes by creating such ethnically homogeneous states after the Second World War, Zamenhof believed designing a neutral, culturally unifying language would ease tensions in a multilingual nineteenth-century Białystok (formerly Belostok). Slavs and Tatars had another idea. They contributed the seductive red lips of their Larry Nixed, Trachea Trixed screen print on steel articulating the Cyrillic letters imposed on the Turkic speakers of Central Asia by the Bolsheviks on a Galeria Arsenał wall instead. A winking, anthropomorphic recreation of Azerbaijani satirical magazine Molla Nəsrəddin—called Madame MMMorphologie—was placed nearby. That publication has its own complicated history with changing alphabets and their accompanying linguistic and ideological standards. In contributing these two works to The Pure Tongue group exhibition, Slavs and Tatars points out what is at best a glaring omission and at worst an act of cultural erasure. Whether in Esperanto’s composite of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages or in the exhibition it inspired, the entire Turkic language-speaking community of Białystok’s Tatars is ignored, and Slavs and Tatars aims to address this.
These alphabet politics are a primary and ongoing concern of Slavs and Tatars, whose forthcoming Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anti-colonial ABCs children’s book, co-authored by Leah Feldman, explores the enforced Cyrillization of the languages of some twenty-five million peoples from 1927 to 1991. “It basically tells the story of phonemes in search of their homes, or their shells,” says Sharifi, continuing that those sounds that didn’t have an equivalent in Cyrillic—like the nasal ڭ and plosive Ҧ—needed to be adapted or introduced to accurately represent them in the new alphabet. The book’s blurb insists that “sometimes the shapes given to sounds can be more like a prison than a place to call home.”
Azbuka Strikes Back represents somewhat of an absurd premise for a consequential subject, reflecting Slavs and Tatars’s emphasis on relatability and humour across its entire oeuvre. “There’s a weird understanding that this serious artwork should always look serious and be very solemn and dour, and black and white, or lit in a certain way,” Sharifi explains of what the collective has in the past railed against by making art that looks “like candy” to lure an audience who might otherwise dismiss such intellectual interests. “For me, they’re very Enlightenment ideas of critique; that critique has to be distant. You have to be objective. But what if I critique something in a kind of very sweaty, hairy, bear-hugging way? How can I critique something, which is incredibly smarmy, and too close, and almost sensual, even? Also, how can I critique something in a festive manner?”
In Slavs and Tatars’ Kirchgängerbanger—a little red book whose cover is marked by the slimy secretions of a snail trail—Johann Georg Hamann is cited as stating, “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” Titled with a bilingual portmanteau of the German Kirchgänger (“churchgoer”) and the English word for a kind of group sex, the art collective’s publication introduces this little-known counter-Enlightenment philosopher with a selection of his equal parts transcendent and vulgar polemics against Reason. “He’s actually the first person within Western literature to write deliberately not to be understood,” explains Sharifi about this fascinating figure who was both a friend and a rival of Immanuel Kant. “Then he has a mental breakdown, literally goes crazy, and becomes a born-again Christian Lutheran… It’s really weird, in the late eighteenth century, to have this writer who’s talking about shit and Jesus’ ass.”
This irreverent approach to the otherwise delicate subjects of language, identity, and faith Slavs and Tatars trade in might well be why they’re so attracted to the obscene and provocative, obscure and impenetrable work of Johann Georg Hamann. Kirchgängerbanger is prefaced with a cover image of a gangster snail giving “Eastside” and “Westside” hand signals from the tips of its tentacles where its eyes should be. Its foreword is titled “Mo’ Hamman, Mo’ Often.” The book brims with complex puns, double entendres, and easter eggs that reveal the unlikely parallels between a notorious German proto-existentialist philosopher from the 1700s and a cosmopolitan contemporary art collective with no fixed address. “When everybody’s writing about clarity, transparency, and everybody’s writing beautiful French . . . he starts to criticize the Enlightenment with a weird mixture of Christ and very dirty language about genitalia and scatology,” says Sharifi about the polemical “Wizard of the North” who famously wrote a defence of the letter H. “On each page, there’s this much text and then even more annotations and footnotes because he would deliberately use Greek, Hebrew, and he didn’t give a shit about people understanding it.”
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