Slavs and Tatars
Beyonsense
August 15–December 10, 2012
Museum of Modern Art, New York
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
T 212 708 9752
F 212 708 9691
www.MoMA.org
www.thethirdline.com
The Third Line is proud to announce the first solo exhibition of Slavs and Tatars in a US museum: Beyonsense, a psychedelic reading room, and a lesson in mysticism within modernity across cultures, histories and geographies.
The Eurasian collective, Slavs and Tatars, present a new installation for Project 98 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Beyonsense takes its name from a translation of zaum, a word used by Russian poets and artists in the early 20th century to describe their experiments with non-referential and sensorial verbal expression to find a universal language. Beyonsense builds upon a recent cycle of the collective’s works—The Faculty of Substitution—that celebrates the non-rational and mystical episodes within modernity, and the revolutionary potential of the sacred and syncretic.
For the installation, Slavs and Tatars have created a reading room of reversals, including a recreation of a little known Dan Flavin work commissioned for a Sufi mosque in downtown New York in the early 1980s. The front area contains objects grounded in the group’s literary interests; passing through hanging carpets, visitors enter a darkened, meditative space featuring text pieces and printed publications.
On October 6, the artists will be joined by Dr. John Perry, expert on Persian linguistics and Middle Eastern cultural historian, for PopRally: a presentation on the pre-modern migration of myths and memes involving birds from India and Iran to Europe and beyond, where they invaded genres from mystical poetry and moral homilies to dirty jokes and Monty Python.
About Slavs and Tatars
The Slavs and Tatars collective sees itself as “a faction for polemics and intimacy that is interested in the region known as Eurasia to the east of the Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” The collective’s work extends across several media and disciplines and covers a broad spectrum of cultural registers from low to high, with an emphasis on the intersections between Slav, Caucasian, and Central Asian influences. Always in search of a basis for comparison, they discover similarities in the seemingly incomparable. These processes of equation lead to an appropriation and reinterpretation of history that is at odds with the familiar narratives of the powerful and victorious.
Their work is housed in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Dubai, U.A.E. They have won several awards including Le prix Fernand Baudin, Brussels in 2008, 2009 and 2012 as well as the Grand Prix of the Brno Biennial in 2008.
About The Third Line
The Third Line is a Dubai based art gallery that represents contemporary Middle Eastern artists locally, regionally and internationally. In addition to on-going exhibitions, The Third Line hosts non-profit, alternative programs to increase interest and debate in the region.
The Third Line also publishes books by associated artists from the region. Books published to date include Presence by Emirati photographer Lamya Gargash (2008), and In Absentia by Palestinian-Kuwaiti Tarek Al-Ghoussein (2009), Cosmic Geometry, an extensive monograph on Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Karen Marta (2011), and most recently the self-titled treatise Huda Lutfi about the artist’s Cairo based practice.
Represented artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Arwa Abouon, Babak Golkar, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Golnaz Fathi, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lamya Gargash, Laleh Khorramian, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sherin Guirgius, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Susan Hefuna, Tarek Al- Ghoussein and Youssef Nabil.
Media contact
Farah Kaysi
Communications Manager
farah [at] thethirdline.com
T +9714 3411 367
