Slavs and Tatars

In its research-based installations, lecture performances, public interventions and artist's books, the collective Slavs and Tatars--founded in 2006 by a Polish-Iranian duo--explores anthropology, religion, language and politics with polemical humor. Slavs and Tatars describe themselves as 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.

Based on their theory that languages, gestures, rituals and goods have always traveled across the perceived borders between the Orient and the Occident, they research into literary and historical sources, exploring interpretative authority and the performative and political nature of language and identity. This book surveys all of their projects to date.