Exhibition Slavs and Tartar - Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

until 29.06. | #3904ARTatBerlin | Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler shows from 28. April 2023 the exhibition “Hang Don’t Cut” of the artist Slavs and Tatars.

Uzbek legend has it that the melon originally grew only in the Garden of Eden. One day, the people received the melon as a divine gift from the Almighty, who had inscribed a message on it before sending it to them. The presence of tiny cracks on the ripe melon caught the attention of the locals, as they appeared to be reminiscent of Arabic script. The pattern is never repeated, so with each melon, the people were not only gifted a treat, but new knowledge. Unfortunately, the people could not decipher the melons’ message. Slavs and Tatars’ newest body of work looks to a variety of melons found in Central Asia, in particular in Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, as repositories of knowledge, as vectors of writing, as well as agencies of resource extraction. Considered to be a rare delicacy, the winter melon is carefully stored in warehouses (ковунхане) to ripen late, amongst the last fruit to do so as the first frosts arrive. So it is that the melon is coveted throughout Eurasia as an exceptional, almost miraculous product of nature: a luscious, sugary yield within an otherwise increasingly barren season and landscape.

Hang Don’t Cut, Slavs and Tatars’ third exhibition at the gallery, presents a taxonomy of unique glass blown lamps (the Slavic etymology of melon stems from the verb дыть or “to blow”), each paying tribute to a particular species of Central Asian melon. Populating the gallery walls, mirror works feature a ‘captcha’ camouflaged within the texture of a melon: a nod to the distinction between human and artificial intelligence while a new range of merch explores the discourse around melons, from cosmology to commerce.

Sanft Power (2022) a carpet doubling as doorway, serves as a threshold in the gallery space, inviting visitors to enter the second part of the exhibition, featuring a collection of works by Andrey Anro, Dozie Kanu, and Lin May Saeed, with whom Slavs and Tatars have collaborated with in the past. The showcased works further develop the concepts of writing, the universe and its complexity through different mediums such as paintings, sculpture, and installation, focusing on the aggression of state capture, whether it be towards natural resources or more intangible yet critical concepts such as integrity, souls, or opportunities.

Slavs 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. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has 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. Slavs 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. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has 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 researc. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently Лук Бук (Look Book) with Distanz Verlag. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin.

Exhibition dates: Friday, 28. April until Thursday, 29. June 2023

To the Gallery

Image caption: Slavs and Tatars, Soft Power (version two), 2022, Photo: Max Herman

Exhibition Slavs and Tartar – Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler | ART at Berlin

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