The march of alphabets has often accompanied that of empires and religions: the Latin script along with the Roman Catholic faith Arabic with Islam and Cyrillic with Orthodox Christianity, and subsequently the USSR. With their trademark mix of high and low culture, ribald humor, and esoteric discourse, the collective addresses the complex issue of alphabet politics-the attempts by nations, cultures, and ideologies to ascribe a specific set of letters to a given language.
In their most recent cycle of work, titled Long Legged Linguistics, the group has investigated language as a source of political, metaphysical, and even sexual emancipation. Pursuing an unconventional research-based approach, the group identifies the “area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia” as the focus of their multidisciplinary practice. Slavs and Tatars is an art collective whose installations, lecture-performances, sculptures, and publications contemplate otherwise little-known affinities, syncretic ideas, belief systems, and rituals among peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
