Raster

Naughty Nasals

The Russian Cyrillization of Polish was introduced in the Russian partition in the nineteenth century. Two Polish letters in particular were problematic: the “ą” and the “ę.” These nasals had disappeared from
most other Slavic languages. The solution came via letters from the Old Slavonic language, Ѫѫ (big yus) and Ѧѧ (little yus): Naughty Nasals underline the affront of Orthodox- Cyrillic on a Catholic-Latin identity. Slavs and Tatars have transformed
the letters into furniture resembling portable confession booths.

Jak ogórek jest życie, raz w garści, raz w odbycie (Life is like a cucumber: one day in your hand, one day in your ass)

An obscene hand gesture specific to Turkic and Slavic cultures, “Figa” revisits the old Egyptian proverb: “Life is like a cucumber: one day in your hand and one day in your ass.”

Hammer and Nipple

Whether in North America, Europe, the Middle East or Asia, we’re increasingly sour on power.

Pan Chrzan

Pan Chrzan is the main hero of Slavs and Tatars’ body of work on Pickle Politics.

Slavs and Tatars_Qit Qat Qlub_Preis der Nationalgallerie_Hamburger bahnhof_2015_Photo David von Becker_1

Vacuums

The conversion of a language from one script to another is a routine act of alphabet penitence. The reason we do so hurriedly—with a dose of chagrin, holding our noses, on the back of a scrap of paper—stems in part from transliteration’s maligned status. One thing is clear: translation it is not. Alas, transliteration is the trashier younger sibling of translation, its more prestigious, older sister.

Hung and Tart

Hung and Tart features a heart that becomes a tongue, enacting a synapsis, or short cut between the conception of speech, symbolic and sincere, and its delivery.

Irokez

The daily taming of hair is an act of civilization, battling the frizzy and curly unruliness of the body.

AÂ AÂ AÂ UR

AÂ AÂ AÂ UR is the original ancient Egyptian demotic text, meaning literally “big, big, very big”, from which the Greeks conceived/translated the name of Hermes Trismegistis (Thrice Great), the author/ founder of Hermeticism, an esoteric body of knowledge that speaks to the great tradition of interfaith dialogue and mysticism.

Ezan Çılgıŋŋŋŋŋları

Prepared for and first exhibited during 8th Berlin Biennale, Ezan Çılgıŋŋŋŋŋları consists of two outsized speakers set up in the form of a rahlé (or stand for holy books) onto which visitors were invited to sit, lie down, relax and reflect.

Larry nixed, Trachea trixed

Larry nixed, Trachea trixed looks at various attempts to Cyrillicize sounds or phonemes that did not previously exist in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, one of many attempts to extend or embed Soviet influence.

Lahestan Nesfeh Jahan

Lahestan Nesfeh Jahan (literally, “Poland, Half the World”) commemorates the forgotten World War II episode of Polish refugees to Iran when Esfahan came to be known as the City of Polish Children. The text is a revision of the city’s legendary slogan, perhaps one of the most famous in Persian, “Esfahan Nesfeh Jahan” (“Esfahan, Half the World”).

Bandari String Fingerling

The daily taming of hair is an act of civilization, battling the unruliness of the body. In this sense the rituals of daily existence, such as combing one’s hair, echo as objects the counsel of the Mirrors for Princes genre.

Swinging Septum

Long eclipsed by the mouth, as source of libidinal linguistics, Swinging Septum restores the nose as an equally discursive and desirous organ of language. A flat silhouette nose sways from left to right, evocative of the facial acrobatics the septum must perform to reach the sonorous heights of /ɛ/ or /ɔ̃/.

Tongue Twist Her

The pole exchanges its topless dancer for something no less racy: a giant, fleshy tongue twirling around and down the pole, a nod to the 60 odd years of changes in parts of the former-Soviet, Turkophone world from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic back to Latin.

Madame MMMorphologie

Standing tall book greets its visitors as a madame. A love story come to life, Madame MMMorphologie winks at her passersby, her long eyelashes linked to the quasi-illicit amorous rapport the book can compel in people.

Love Letters

Love Letters series of carpets address the issue of manipulation of alphabets across Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic, through the Russian Revolution’s most well-known, if conflicted, poet-champion, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Other Peoples’ Prepositions

Prepositions are a class of words that explain relationship; though perhaps no preposition is as central to Slavs and Tatars’ cosmology as ѿ [ot], literally ‘from’ in several Slavic languages. Other People’s Prepositions attempts to restore this liturgical indulgence ѿ, combining the Greek omega and theta through a meditation on the preposition’s more carnivalesque implications.