Slavs And Tatars
The Artist as Wise Fool
Course Detail
DescriptionOver the past two decades, research has played an increasingly present role in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. Given the open-ended remit of art, artists are called upon to provide new insight into often overlooked or intractable issues in ways often implausible for scholars, activists, journalists, and others. Slavs and Tatars have shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The course The Artist as Wise Fool examines various strategies of knowing and un-knowing, of wisdom and idiocy, which are crucial to creating relevant works in an age where information and its dark matter–disinformation–occupy equal spaces in the public imagination.Meet the PresenterSlavs And TatarsSlavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Imbued with humor and a generosity of spirit, the collective’s work commonly blends pop visuals with esoteric traditions, oral rituals with scholarly analysis in a way that challenges our often times one-dimensional way of seeing relationships between science, religion, power, and identity. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle Zurich and Albertinum, Dresden, among others. Slavs and Tatars has published more than ten books to date, including Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on language politics; as well as a translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B Tauris, 2017).