Slavs and Tatars: Red-Black Thread

Red-Black Thread explores the construction of black identity not from the traditional Anglophone and Francophone worlds of the Atlantic but rather from the Russophone idiom of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Commissioned by the Walker and Metropolitan Museums on the occasion of the Siah Armajani retrospective “Follow This Line”, Red Black Thread looks at the experience of labor, race, and sexuality from a shared Russian/Soviet and African-American perspective to better understand failed promises of conviviality and co-existence.

Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently The Contest of the Fruits (MIT Press, 2021) as well as a translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B Tauris, 2017). In addition to launching a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars recently opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in Moabit.