Slavs and Tatars: Mollah Nasruddin the AntiModern. At Gwangju Biennale 2012. Photo plucked from the Slavs and Tatars website
Art Dubai recently announced that the Marker program of its 2014 fair (in March) will be curated by Slavs and Tatars, the artist collective. The Marker program consists of several booths within the fair’s main exhibition halls, that blend in with the galleries, but are non-commercial and usually dedicated to a single artistic project. In 2014 the focus will be on Central Asia and the Caucasus. 2013’s Marker Program was curated by the Lagos-based Bisi Silva and included West African galleries.
Slavs and Tatars have become one of the most fashionable artistic outfits around, with a busy globe-trotting agenda. Their use of irony and other forms of humor to shed light on the Eurasian periphery of the international art world has been highly successful. Wishing to remain anonymous, the core of the group consists of an Iranian and a Polish artist.
One may expect a show similar to the ‘Love Me / Love Me Not‘ collateral event of the Venice Biennale, 2013, in which the group participated, but which also seemed inspired by its approach. That exhibition, funded by the private Azeri Yarat foundation, included artists from the Caucasus, Iran, Turkey and the Russian Federation. The question is what kind of artists the collective will source from Central Asia, where a depressed and repressed cultural sector may not resonate with the group’s penchant for light-hearted wittiness.