Outset Germany_Switzerland was pleased to have supported Slavs and Tatars’ participation at Venice Biennale 2019 and to donate a work of the installation to the public collection of a German institution.
Founded in 2006, the artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars, 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.
The installation Dillio Plaza crowned the main exhibition at the Arsenale, providing it a reflective coda. Conceived of as a zone of relaxation and physical and spiritual reinforcement, it offered among other things the possibility of refreshment with a glass of sauerkraut juice and a seating area around a specially designed fountain. The entirety was dedicated to Johann Georg Hamann, a German philosopher who rejected the Enlightenment division between intellect and emotion. The main pavilion in the Giardini exhibited a full series of embossed textual works by Slavs and Tatars.
Fermentation features prominently in Slavs and Tatars’ newest cycle of work: a way to move beyond the binaries of Enlightenment thinking. To ferment is to preserve and to rot, to activate bacteria and to break down a substance, all at once. Some see in bacteria the very first Other: a kind of digestive Abrahamic hospitality. Perhaps most importantly, fermentation originated on the Eurasian steppe, a crucial means of preserving nutrition for the nomadic tribes of the region, those very people against which Western civilization has defined itself for millennia: the Turkic peoples, the Barbarians, the Mongol hordes.
Half-sculptural intervention and half-scenography, a carpet is dedicated to Johann Georg Hamann, the enfant terrible of the anti-Enlightenment or, in his own words, ‘to Nobody and to Two?’. Johann Georg Hamann was a contemporary and friend of Immanuel Kant. However, Hamann was an opponent of enlightenment and rationalism. He put humor and wit in front of rational thinking and pled for the transformative potential of non-linear thinking. ‘At No One and at None’ is a pamphlet for the receipt of the mute, h ‘, written from the perspective of the bush itself.
