Slavs and Tatars

Formed as a reading circle in 2006, Slavs and Tatars is an international art collective whose work addresses themes such as languages, national identities and faith, with a specific focus on the geographic area from the former Berlin Wall to the Great Wall of China. For this exhibition, the artists present Mother Tongues and Father Throats, a large carpet dedicated to the guttural sound “kh.” This sound, held sacred by Judaism, Islam and Orthodox Christianity, constitutes a kind of linguistic divide between East and West, since it is not present in Latin alphabets. The artists reproduce the corresponding Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic letters in the part of the oral cavity used to pronounce this sound, countering the throat as a source of sound for a mystical language to the more profane role of the tongue. With this work Slavs and Tatars reflect on the ways in which identity is constructed and the processes of exclusion that this implies; just as the Greeks called those who did not speak their language ‘barbarians’, the process of inclusion and exclusion is eminently cultural and passes primarily through language.