Wripped Scripped

Pop culture, polemics, science: the latest antic by the artist collective

The internationally renowned art collective Slavs and Tatars is devoted to the area known as Eurasia: east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. Considering themselves as “archeologists of the everyday”, the collective focuses on the interplay of religion, power, language and identities. In books, exhibitions, and performances, they investigate mentalities, myths, traditions, and transitions, through a combination of scholarly research, polemics, and low-brow humor.
Wripped Scripped continues the collective’s investigation of alphabets as an equally political and affective platform. While the roll-out of new alphabets has often accompanied the rise and fall of empires, the artists attempt to liberate not so much peoples and nations but rather the sounds and letters that make up langauge. Chapters include a look at the phoneme [kh] as a sacred perspective in the Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets; Germany’s relationship with Orientalism through the tetragraph [dsch]; and a study of nasal phonemes in constructing Polish and Turkish identity.