Maria Markiewicz recently met with Slavs and Tatars to talk about the changing roles of art and artists in this disruptive world. How should art answer to the changing reality and what can it bring to the table? In this interview, Slavs and Tatars, members of this year’s Allegro Prize jury, reflect on the past 16 years of their practice and on what art means to them.
Maria Markiewicz: Slavs and Tatars was set up in 2006 when the world looked drastically different compared to the one we live in today. How has this affected your practice?
Slavs and Tatars: As you’ve said, we’ve started Slavs and Tatars in a very different world – there was a general march towards liberal democracy in the East; the EU welcomed its biggest enlargement in 2004… The Iraq war was considered a disaster in 2006 but nothing like the disasters we’ve seen ever since. Because Slavs and Tatars was created in a very specific context, in 2016, when we marked 10 years of our practice, we felt like we had to look very seriously in the mirror and reconsider what our practice means now. This resulted in setting up a residency-mentorship programme in 2018 and the Pickle Bar two years later, as well as in us doing more curatorial work – all these initiatives were created as a way to open up Slavs and Tatars to the larger public.
MM: What do you mean by this opening up?
S&T: The residency, the Pickle Bar, and the curating we’ve recently started doing more or less happened at the same time – they’ve helped us to reclaim Slavs and Tatars as a platform, as opposed to being a collective… When you become more established as an artist, it comes with a certain degree of responsibility – you can either do bigger, more expensive works, or you can try to grow horizontally, providing a space for discourse through passing the spotlight to others.
Slavs and Tatars was never a name of a group of individuals; we’re not a rock group. We’ve always perceived it as the name of the work that we do, as our mission statement – it doesn’t matter who’s doing the work, as long as the work is done. That’s how the idea of the Pickle Bar came about. It’s a project space where we explore the limits of language – something in between hospitality and an artistic site, that invites people to sit down, relax and enjoy themselves.
MM: What about the residency-mentorship programme? What makes it unique?
S&T: Our residency incorporates the resident into our working structure and activities – the resident works with us 2-3 days a week, demystifying our back office and learning about what a successful, sustainable artistic practice means. Most residencies, even when they’re generous, will give you a key to their site and say, ‘thank you very much’. For us, we try to integrate the resident into our everyday practices and how we work. Even the best art schools in the world don’t really teach you about the nuts and bolts of artmaking, and here I mean things like finances and administration – knowing your way around all of that is really important to make sure you don’t just burn out at the age of thirty. Of course, the intellectual stuff is there too. It’s always important in what we’re doing, but what makes this residency programme special is that we’re not solely focusing on that…
MM: Going back to the pickle, it’s a symbol that is present in your work on many occasions as a way of exploring cultural differences and complexities through humour and satire…
S&T: The pickle is an example of what we often call a ‘stupid’ medium – it’s something very basic, something that your ‘babcia’ makes… It’s very rustic and a bit pretentious – what this simple, ‘stupid’ medium allows us to do is to unravel much more complex things in an accessible way. For example, we use the pickle as a way to critique the binarism of the Enlightenment, because pickling, fermentation, is essentially preserving something through managed rotting. It’s taking something that you don’t want and using it to achieve your goal – this is a very anti-Enlightenment idea because the Enlightenment was a time of black-and-white thinking. There was rational and irrational, secular and religious, and what we’re doing is mixing those extremes.
But then you can go even further and think about the bacteria that take part in the fermentation process. The way we talk about bacteria is very similar to the way we talk about assimilation and immigration – both migrants and the bacteria are on the outside. We cannot let them in; we have to sanitise our hands, sterilise everything… Through revisiting Pasteur’s legacy, we’re saying that the migrant is part of us in the same way that the bacteria is also part of us. And as you’ve said, we’re saying so in a very humorous, silly way.
MM: Silly but also critical and informative.
S&T: I think that’s the sweet spot of Slavs and Tatars – we can criticise something, but at the same time we can be cheerful about that criticism. When you have to criticise something, it’s very easy to be overly silly or overly critical. The question is: how to do both? How to criticise and be fun at the same time? That’s something very difficult to do, but our goal is to bring these two together.
MM: “The future is certain. It’s the past which is unpredictable” – I found this sentence in your Instagram bio. Could you elaborate on that?
S&T: We already know that the future is shit [laughs], but the past can be good – depending on who’s in power. Although our work is considered to be political, we never talk about current events. I don’t think it’s the artist’s role to be clear. I think it’s the artist’s role to maintain a level of ambiguity that allows people from both ends of the spectrum – the right and the left, the religious and the non-religious – to find things that they feel speak to them.
MM: Why is this ambiguity so important in your work?
S&T: For us, art is about disruption. It’s about surprises and transformation, and these can only happen in a space that invites contemplation and quietness. You can’t do that with the present, it’s too noisy. In a way, we’re representing an anti-modernist position; we’re asking how do we move forward by looking at the past. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not against modernity. Like everyone else, we’re also using computers and iPhones… It’s all about looking at things critically. We’re not saying that modernity and Enlightenment were completely bad; they presented us with amazing things in terms of science and medicine, but they also left us colonial legacies and a devastated environment.
MM: You’ve recently opened a new exhibition in Belgium focusing solely on your printed works. Why this focus on print?
S&T: Print is important for us for many reasons… If we take a normal artistic hierarchy, the artwork is what comes first – it’s what the galleries sell, and museums buy… Further down the pyramid, we have print, and we’re all about reversing this pyramid, putting it on its head. For us, the book is the most important thing; everything flows from there – some of our most expensive installations first existed in a book. Books are accessible and affordable, and it’s pretty much where we’ve started – Slavs and Tatars essentially started as a book club, but then things got overshadowed by our bigger, more spectacular works. So, this upcoming exhibition is really an attempt to put that back into the conversation.
MM: Will you be looking for the same level of criticality and discursivity that characterises your works in the Allegro Prize submissions?
S&T: It’s important to us that the work has a meaning, that it’s not purely formal. But we sometimes take it as a given, that the work has to have a discourse to it – it should never be at the forefront. This is again the question of trying to bring two things together… If work has a context, meaning, or text, and is very explicitly put on a wall, then that’s not a good artwork. The artwork has to be translated by the artist. It has to be digested. This is precisely what art brings to the table and what scholarly, academic journals are lacking. It’s some kind of a metaphysical, phenomenological experience that cannot happen through a discourse. It can only happen through form, visual language, or an oral experience, so in non-rational, non-analytical ways.
MM: Do you have any advice for the applicants?
S&T: Look beyond yourselves. In the Anglo-American world, there is an excessive emphasis on one’s own experience – on what I want to say, what I am experiencing, what I am feeling… As a collective, we don’t care. What you have to say is interesting to us only if you can make it relevant for the larger world.
Ksenia Malykh is an art historian, a curator, and a cultural manager. She’s the Head of the Research Platform at the PinchukArtCentre and this year, she’s also joining us on the jury panel of the Allegro Prize 2022.
