Slavs & Tatars
E-Z Chasm
Past
28 September – 27 October 2017
11 Haritos Street, Kolonaki
Kalfayan Galleries are pleased to present in the Athens gallery the first gallery solo exhibition in Greece of the art collective Slavs and Tatars. Titled “E-Z Chasm”, the show opens on Thursday, 28th of September 2017, 20.00 – 22.00.
For Slavs and Tatars’ first show at Kalfayan Galleries, the artists explore the intellect of the heart and that of the breath that make up hesychasm, a controversial Orthodox prayer practice. Often considered to be a syncretic ritual with influences of Buddhist mantras or Sufi dhikr, hesychasm allows the artists to excavate the hidden corners of ideologies, the edges of empires that make up their rich practice. At the center of the exhibit is a new work, ‘RiverBed’, a vernacular seating structure found across Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus. As opposed to a chair, where individual space is delineated, RiverBed redeems the notion of collective seating and the fluidity of activity that accompanies these structures. While reading is at the heart of the artists’ practice, notions of hospitality also allow for reclining, sipping tea or the like. Their new ‘Kitab Kebabs’ series highlights the non-rational, non-cerebral approach to knowledge: via the unlikely skewering of books.
Artists
Slavs & 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. 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. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institution across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. Slavs and Tatars has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region.
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