Slavs and Tatars

Slavs and Tatars’ first animated film, The Contest of the Fruits, takes a satirical 19th century Uyghur poem (munāẓara) as a starting point for investigations of language, politics, religion, humor, resilience and resistance, in the form of a rap battle between various fruits.

The Contest of the Fruits was developed by the collective during their residency at The Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford (US) in 2021 and has been shown at Basement Roma (2023), Centre Pompidou, Metz (2022), and Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford (2021).

The presentation at Kraupa–Tuskany Zeidler marks its German premiere.

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 Лук Бук (Look Book) with Distanz Verlag. 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.