Artists: Slavs and Tatars

Dimensions and material: 2 sculptures (Triangulation), painted concrete 27 x 24 x 23 cm

Placement: At the entrance

Context

On behalf of Konsthall C. Shown at the exhibition Station C in 2011. 

“Inspired by a policy to separate the Central Asian population of the Soviet Union from Islam, called ‘To Moscow Not Mecca’, Not Moscow Not Mecca chooses not to choose between the two major narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries, that of revolutionary Communism and of political Islam. The Soviet experiment failed, but it was one of the rare collisions of the two movements, without the mediation or triangulation of the West or capitalism.”

Artist biography

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia and founded in 2006. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture-performances.

Slavs and Tatars is represented by: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (NYC), Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (Berlin), Raster Gallery (Warsaw) and The Third Line (Dubai). 

Slavs and Tatars' exhibitions, books, printed matter and lecture-performances draw upon the stylistic palette of popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The artists’ work can be organized according to cycles of research, each on a different theme or topic, from alphabet politics (Language Arts), to medieval advice literature (Mirrors for Princes) to an investigation of syncretism (Not Moscow Not Mecca).