Beyond Nonsense: What Slavs and Tatars Make

Anders Krueger is intrigued by Slavs and Tatars’ focus on Eurasian geo-politics but questions their use of style and the coherence of their politics. When I first came across the name Slavs and Tatars, four or five years ago, I thought they must be one of the newly popular, of-the-moment artists’ groups in Russia, perhaps from some place not normally included in the international contemporary art circuit — perhaps even from one of the proud cities on the Volga where Slavs and Tatars have been coexisting for centuries: Nizhni Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Astrakhan… I assumed, without knowing anything about the work, that the collective addressed a crucial in-built complication in Russian culture.