Slavs and Tatars: Made in Dschermany

We all do it. Sheepishly, perhaps, but we do it. The finger lingers between the k and the q, groping in the dark for something to approximate the sound of [arabic qaf]. The lips gloss over the [cyrillic ja], eyes flitting back and forth, from [ya] to [ja], none too happy with the approximation. On a daily basis, we Talysh, Tatars, and Turks—not to mention Greeks, Russians, Chinese, and Arabs—are confronted with the prickly problem of transliteration. Whether typing a quick email, deciphering a street sign, or transcribing a recently arrived relative’s name on official documents, we are often called upon to squeeze one set of sounds into another, unseemly, set of letters. The conversion of a language from one script to another is a routine act of alphabet penitence. The reason we do so hurriedly—with a dose of chagrin, holding our noses, on the back of a scrap of paper—stems in part from transliteration’s maligned status. One thing is clear: translation it is not. (excerpt from Wripped Scripped)

Made in Dschermany extends Slavs and Tatars’ artistic practice into German orientalism, philology and the country’s complex relationship with Islam, through the perspective of four letters: DSCH. As keen observers of epiphenomena–from monobrows to mistranslations–at the Albertinum’s Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, the artists shed light on the little-known history of Germany’s relationship with Islam, at a time when issues of faith and identity are increasingly instrumentalized against that very history. A scenography of new sculptural works–crowd control barriers repurposed into social lecterns–forms the center of the exhibition. Applying their notorious meat grinder of dissonances to various phonemes, Made in Dschermany invites us to thoroughly read not only our languages but also ourselves as composite and conflicted subjectivities.

The largest presentation of the artists’ work in Germany to date, Made in Dschermany brings together all three axes of the collective’s work: a robust program of lecture-performances and a symposium will make up the public program, a comprehensive exhibition as well as interventions in the Dresden Porcelain Collection and the Mathematisch-Physikalischer-Salon of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden will present artwork from their different work cycles as well as new pieces. Co-published by the Albertinum and Kunstverein Hannover, the new artists’ publication Wripped Scripped continues the artists’ wide-ranging work on language politics, including a study of gender fluidity in a 14th century Perso-Arabic science of letters.

Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars are an art collective whose work takes the little-known affinities, syncretic ideas, belief systems and language politics between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China as a premise for thorough examinations of our present. Their work has been exhibited around the globe, from the MoMA to the Istanbul Modern, the Vienna Secession to the Tate Modern.

Events
May 30
6:30pm
Lecture-performance Transliterative Tease

June 2
2pm
Guided tour by Slavs and Tatars
4pm
Lecture-performance I Utter Other

Exhibition talks
June 27
Kathleen Reinhardt (Curator)
July 11
Gal Kirn (Political philosopher, Dresden/Berlin)
September 12
Mihael Švitek (Cultural linguist TU Dresden)
October 5
Wendy Shaw (Professor, Art History of Islamic Cultures FU Berlin)

Symposium “Sum, ergo Cogito”
October 6
What happens when a text reads me? As opposed to the Cartesian notion of subjectivity where I read the text, the one-day symposium will focus on acts of language and reading which resist the pitfalls of anthropomorphy: from the scriptural to slang.

The exhibition was conceived by Slavs and Tatars, Hilke Wagner (director Albertinum) and Kathleen Reinhardt (curator Albertinum).

The Albertinum is the museum of modern and contemporary art of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and holds one of the largest collections of paintings and sculpture from the early 19th century to the present in Germany. The Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau is the Albertinum’s hub for exhibitions of contemporary art.