The founders of Slavs and Tatars met over a decade ago, but have been working as a formal art collective for six years. They started out as a sort of "reading group" or "book club", sharing rare or out-of-print publications of an anthropological and linguistic bent with each other and a growing group of friends. Their evolution into the production of works of art and their own publications was a gradual, but a natural one, always grounded in the "act of reading together, not just the act of reading, but also redeeming the act of reading". These founding members had come from an editorial background and, thus, the idea of bringing together visuals and content was an organic one, yet as this idea expanded over the years, it provided their audience with a broader experience of their content and message as an intellectual, sensory and/or spiritual experience that aims to demystify concepts that are often alien, obscure or overly simplified by the western world. As is the case with their most recent solo show at the MoMA New York, visitors can "experience the space", to simply dwell in an environment and delve into it in a relatively superficial fashion or to engage with it on a deeper level through an interaction with the pieces and reading of their publications. Even children can find a place for themselves within the Slavs and Tatars omniverse, responding to the childish wit and humour, as well as the interactive nature of certain works.
As members of the collective put it, their works have comprised an
end of a Western Promise. We lived in major European cities, studied at the finer institutions of the west, but found something was missing. We found it important to look elsewhere, beyond the major capitals of the western world. One of the original founding objectives, the polemics of Slavs and Tatars, is that many countries in the East are so hell bent on modernising at any price. They look at westernisation as modernisation, they look towards the West. We don't esteem enough our own heritage. Since we started in 2006, the situation has changed a little bit, with the crisis in the West and the general crisis of confidence in the West, people are looking less to the West. But that isn't for the right reasons, it's not because the west is "broken". There should be a kind of home-grown approach to modernity. One needs to find one's own approach to modernity.
Slavs and Tatars have been described by Holland Cotter of The New York Times as "a publishing concern...with a worthy mission (to focus on multicultural Eurasia)". HG Masters of Asia Art Pacific writes that "humor, and its potential to offer a seductive form of critique, allows them to introduce their arcane subject matter to a broad international audience, and move beyond the weary rhetoric of identity politics and postcolonialism". In an article in Artforum, Tate curator Nicholas Cullinan writes that the group is "the most cosmopolitan of collectives, where a geopolitics of globe-trotting allows their shape-shifting projects and concerns to continuously cross-pollinate divergent, and sometimes diametrically opposed, cultural specificities".
As for the "anonymous" character of the collective, it is in line with the overarching sense of generosity that they aim to convey through their work as they shift the spotlight from themselves as artists to shine fully on their content. They explain that
It's not about our experiences or our biographies, it's not about how we were raised or our experience growing up, which is a perfectly valid premise for making art, but that's not what interests us, what interests us is the world outside and we are trying constantly to reflect the attention that is being put towards us and put it towards the subject matter.
Their work often takes place in the public space. They swiftly leaped into the throttle of the world art scene, making an impact with major exhibitions as early as 2009, presenting such incisive works as the 79.89.09 project which referenced keys dates decades apart - the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the fall of Communism in 1989, in order to gain a perspective of the current events of the present. For the 10th Sharjah Biennial, the collective presented Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, an elaboration on 79.89.09, which looked at the folklore and crafts accompanying the ideological impulses of the end of Communism and the beginning of revolutionary Islam.