The curators of the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts: Slavs and Tatars

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. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle Zurich; Albertinum, Dresden; and Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; among others. Their public lectures have been presented at leading universities including Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Warsaw, Columbia University, and University of Tehran. In addition to their translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B Tauris), Slavs and Tatars have published ten books to date, most recently Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on the politics of alphabets and transliteration. The 33rd edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts is their curatorial debut.

“With the rise of populism across the globe, in often reductive and revanchist forms, there has been a vigorous debate of late about who constitutes “the people”. For more than a millennium, satire has been a particularly effective, if contested, genre to explore this and other questions … With varying degrees of invective, satire can tease, taunt or terrorise. But is each joke, as George Orwell maintained, really a tiny revolution?”

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Slavs and Tatars, Gut of Gab (Sękowski), 2018; resin, steel; 160×60×50 cm. Courtesy of the artists.