Last May, the indepen­dent rus­sian cul­tural portal Colta.ru published an article on Slavs and Tatars. Joel Regev and Masha Shtut­man talk about the uniqueness of their activities.

Here are some excerpts:

Arming them­selves with an acute sense of indeter­minacy, the modern science of revolution and the materialist appropriation of mystical prac­tices, the col­lec­tive Slavs and Tatars is one of the prin­cipal fac­tions in a strug­gle for a truly materialist, revolutionary art. In the com­pany of minds like philosopher Reza Negarestani or artist Alexan­der Singh and his project The Mark of the Third Stripe,[1] Slavs and Tatars has landed on the sur­face of a planet whose name we still do not know. What we do know, however, is that the key to the future of radical, eman­cipatory politics—as well as knowledge—depends on its suc­cess­ful colonization.

At first glance, Slavs and Tatars can be slid easily into a category defined by Claire Bishop as “the social turn in con­tem­porary art.” For star­ters, the group exchan­ges individual author­ship for that of the col­lec­tive; as we know, the col­laborative nature of the work is one of the defining features of par­ticipatory art. The genre sup­plants the individual acts of the artist-virtuoso—who creates objects for an often sterile and anonymous gal­lery space—with col­laborative actions intervening direc­tly into the sur­roun­ding world, effec­ting change within it. This kind of process-over-product recurs throughout Slavs and Tatars’ work; their projects often con­sist of han­ging posters, or con­duc­ting col­laborative tours, lec­tures, group readings and discus­sions of texts. Also akin to par­ticipatory art, the cen­tral objec­tive of their prac­tice is the “creation of a new type of sociality,” for­ging their own minority nation—the yet-to-be-defined com­munity of those who inhabit the space “between the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.”