A series of prints on the overlooked story of mysticism within modernity, made to accompany Beyonsense, Slavs and Tatars’ Projects 98 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
2012
mimeograph print,
dimensions variable (if framed 70 x 100 cm)
edition of 30 (+1 AP), numbered
300€ plus tax and shipping
Order here
Please join us for the research presentation of “The secrets of Lake Balkhash: community narratives, memories, and landscapes of past and futures” with author Aigerim Kapar.
Following the first launch in Bor, this event co-hosted by Slavs and Tatars will also serve as the Berlin launch of the publication As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (Mousse/Rockbund Museum, 2022).
21 October 2022
from 6.30 pm
Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” focuses on the study of local values of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan and how these values impact the everyday lives of local communities. Lake Balkhash is one of the biggest endorheic water bodies in the world and has a millennia-long history of sociocultural life, ecological traditions, and seminomadic management methods. The region also represents the position of the Kazakh Steppe, where the interests of China and Russia intersect. Today, the industrialization and militarization of the colonial Soviet period continue to prevail and frame the basin as a zone of ecological and social crisis. Lake Balkhash may disappear in twenty years and faces a similar situation to the drainage of the Aral Sea by the Soviet government in the 1950s for the purposes of agricultural production.
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” aims to rethink the history of the region through a decolonial lens and study the future of the region reimagined by local communities. The research project is part of Artcom Platform’s Care for Balkhash initiative, and As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future, a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts of Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, China, Kazakhstan. It was conceived and initiated by Biljana Ćirić in 2019 after conducting curatorial research in East Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe, where the project is now situated. The three-year project has been conducted via individuals, cells, organizations, and institutions: Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), What Could/Should Curating Do? (Belgrade), Artcom Platform (Astana/Almaty), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Public Library (Bor). The project does not attempt yet another critical investigation into Chinese colonialism, but rather seeks to unpack the complexities that certain regions are confronting within their current connections to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as their established commonalities.
Aigerim Kapar (b. 1987, Kazakhstan) is an interdependent curator, interdisciplinary researcher, and a decolonial activist based in Almaty and Astana. Kapar founded Artcom Platform, a Central Asian community-based contemporary art and public engagement organization in 2015. She has also been organizing Art Collider, a school where art meets science bringing communities together since 2017. Kapar curates a hybrid reality project Steppe Space, an important space for contemporary art and culture of Central Asia, and initiated projects of care for lake ecosystems SOS Taldykol and Balqashqa Qamqor in 2020. Her key previous works include Re-membering: Dialogues of Memories (2019), an international intergenerational project in memory of survivors and victims of twentieth-century political repressions in Kazakhstan, and Time&Astana: After Future (2017–18), an urban art research and engagement project. Kapar is currently a resident at Slavs and Tatars’ program in Moabit. www.instagram.com/aigerimkapar
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future.
Published by Rockbund Art Museum and Mousse Publishing, 2022
Edited by Biljana Ćirić
Contributions by Zdenka Badovinac, Aziza Abdulfatah Busser, Robert Bobnič, Biljana Ćirić, Marija Glavaš, Sinkneh Eshetu, Chen Liang, Salem Mekuria, Aigerim Kapar, Dragan Stojmenovič, Larys Frogier, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Robel Temesgen, Jelica Javanovič, Alex Ulko, Kaja Kraner, Tara McDowell, Оasphy Zheng, Enanye Kibret, Gebeyehu Desalew, Manuel Borja-Villel, Mabel Tapia, and Ocean & Wavz.
Fillip Editions – Folio Series
Following Institutions by Artists: Volume One and the eponymous convention from which both volumes take their name, this second anthology of texts continues the work of unpacking artists’ relationships to—and creation of—a larger set of structures that increasingly regulate, demarcate, and codify contemporary artistic practice: centers of economic and cultural capital; state and private apparatus; and sites of display, storage and production.
This volume’s contributing authors present a series of historical and contemporary case studies, investigating artists’ connections to various manifestations of institutionalized practice. These case studies describe practices that developed in places as disparate as Vancouver, London (Ontario), East Los Angeles, Scotland, and Trinidad and Tobago. Also included are transcripts of two debates held during the 2012 Institutions by Artists Convention, which asked: “Is there space for art outside the market and the state?” and “Should Artists Professionalize?”
With contributions by Tania Bruguera, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Dana Claxton, Christopher Cozier, Jeff Derksen, Sean Dockray, Candice Hopkins, Jesi Khadivi, Jaleh Mansoor, Philip Monk, Christopher Régimbal, Slavs and Tatars, Claire Tancons, Tania Willard and others
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“By their very nature secret practices, being secret, are generally hard to comment on. Still, we can imagine that the institution of secret marriage must be at least as old as that of the public one, possibly older, in fact, if one is to imagine the birth of ‘coupledom’ as taking place between two people alone under the cover of night. Secret marriage today remains an incalculable part of the institution – and perhaps one of its most romantic forms. […]
As though to compensate, we celebrate the secret ceremony – gay, straight or non-binary – not with equal but greater fervour. Just as a stolen glance is more arousing, a forbidden tryst more urgent, so too is the secret marriage more alive, more keen. Marry in secret in solidarity, in lust, out of an exhaustive need. Marry in secret and do with the heart what the gun cannot: melt the frozen conflicts, be they in Abkhazia or in Glendale.”
Excerpt from the publication
Offset print, 26 × 20 cm, 16 pages, stitched binding, mimeograph print
Edition of 35
support (at) mottodistribution.com
A libretto of daily polemics, reflections, and musings on the very defeatist approach to time so dear to S&T, A Thirteenth Month Against Time runs thirty-two days (or pages) in length and acts as an addendum to one’s everyday calendar or diary.
2008, mimeograph print, offset print, hand-pasted colour stickers, stitched binding, in black case with white embossed foil
Edition of 100, numbered
support (at) mottodistribution.com
Slavs and Tatars @ Motto Berlin. 05.04.2018
Book Launch / Presentation 7pm
Slavs and Tatars, Motto Books and Westfälischer Kunstverein are proud to present Kirchgängerbanger : a new, bi-lingual (Eng/DE) reader on Johan Georg Hamann, the 18th century polemicist, frenemy of Kant, and proto-Postmodernist who mixed faith and sexuality in ways that would make even Bataille blush: “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” Includes the triple-platinum hits “New apology of the Letter H” and “New Apology of the Letter H by Itself.” Offset print, 92 pages, 20 x 14 cm. 12€
On the occasion of their exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Slavs and Tatars present Kirchgängerbanger: a new, bi-lingual (Eng/DE) reader on Johann Georg Hamann, the 18th century polemicist, frenemy of Kant, and proto-Postmodernist who critiqued the Enlightenment with an unlikely mix of Lutheran theology and vulgar sexuality, enough to make even Bataille blush: “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” With an introduction by Slavs and Tatars and a selection of Hamann essays including the triple-platinum hits “New apology of the Letter H” and “New Apology of the Letter H by Itself”.
Khhhhhhh. Slavs and Tatars. Mousse Publishing / The Moravian Gallery.
A reconsideration of pedagogy, progress, and the sacred role of language via the perspective of a single pesky phoneme, [kh]. Khhhhhhh explores the thorny issues of knowledge versus wisdom and the immediacy of the oral versus the remoteness of the written word thru a fireside chat around sacred hospitality and Velimir Khlebnikov.
English and Czech
64 pages
23 x 31 cm
D 18€
Kaleidoscope Issue #11 – Summer 2011
HIGHLIGHTS: Steven Shearer by Dieter Roelstraete; Slavs & Tatars by Carson Chan; Kaari Upson by Quinn Latimer; Alina Szapocznikow by Chris Sharp; Greg Parma-Smith interview by Nicolas Guagnini.
MAIN THEME: POP RIGHT NOW: Roundtable with Bettina Funcke, Massimiliano Gioni, John Miller, moderated by Joanna Fiduccia, with a postscript by Boris Groys, and artworks by Darren Bader; Justin Bieber by Francesco Spampinato; Rashid Johnson interview by Alessio Ascari; The Dark Side of Hipness Mark Greif and Richard Lloyd in conversation.
MONO: MARK LECKEY: Lost in the Supermarket by Barbara Casavecchia; The Browser Is a Portal by Isobel Harbison; Special Project by Mark Leckey; Art Stigmergy interview by Mark Fisher.
COLUMNS: PIONEERS: Morgan Fisher by Simone Menegoi; FUTURA: Helen Marten interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist; MAPPING THE STUDIO: Simon Denny by Luca Cerizza; CRITICAL SPACE: Douglas Coupland interview by Markus Miessen; ON EXHIBITION: Jeff Koons’ “The New” by Paola Nicolin; LAST QUESTION: And What About Pop Music? answer by Scott King.
D 7,50€
Available for Distribution
Again, A Time Machine, A Book Works touring exhibition in five parts.
Artists are playing with words again – raiding the archive, bringing the dead back to life, making the living look dead. Quicker than the ever-elusive present, they are forging a practice through words, images, books, and ephemera, that begins to anticipate the past, forecast possible histories and re-visit alternative futures.
Again, A Time Machine is a fluid tour, reinventing itself as work moves from venue to venue. Based on new commissions and archival presentations, it will generate ephemera, performance and printed material, in response to a theme which plays with and inverts notions of time, archive, distribution and received pasts and perfect futures.
Jonathan Monk
Slavs and Tatars
Dora Garcia
The Happy Hypocrite
Part One: Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 26 February to 16 April 2011.
Opening: Friday 25 February, 6 to 9pm.
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EVENTS:
Jonathan Monk artist’s talk
Saturday 26 February, 3–4.30pm
Slavs and Tatars artist’s talk
Thursday 24 March, 6.30-8pm
The Happy Hypocrite
Say What You See
Co-hosted by An Endless Supply and Maria Fusco
Thursday 31 March, 6.30–10pm
Dora Garcia artist’s talk
Thursday 14 April, 6.30–8pm
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FORTHCOMING
Motto Berlin
6 May to 2 June 2011
The Showroom, London
14 June 2011 to 19 May 2012
Spike Island, Bristol
16 September to 9 October 2011
White Columns, New York
23 October to 19 November 2011