Amid raised voices and raised hands, this exhibition gathers gestures of disagreement, transformation, and collective resilience. The Contest of the Fruits brings together new and recent works by Slavs and Tatars drawing on literary histories, esoteric traditions, and spiritual iconographies across Eurasia — from Uighur poetry to Sufi cosmologies.
For nearly two decades, Slavs and Tatars have cultivated a practice grounded in collective inquiry and discursive exchange. Originally founded not as an art collective but as a book club, their work remains deeply rooted in language — both literal and metaphorical. Their multifaceted approach spans exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances, which together form the triadic core of their output.
Presented across two gallery spaces, the works are grouped into two installations: Self-Help — a nail-bar offering talon upgrades, anchored by a wallpaper piece that translates the name of the mythical Simurgh into international sign language, and The Contest of the Fruits — a video installation that reimagines a 19th-century Uighur poem as a rap battle between animated fruits. Across varied media, the exhibition traces the collective’s sustained interest in the peripheries of language and ritual, rather than their centres: where satire and scripture, mistranslation and mysticism converge.
It is at the edges of empire — porous, plural, and often overlooked — that hybridity forms and persists, not as spectacle, but as a defiance of state-sanctioned erasure and the commodification of culture.
Read the full exhibition text here.
Preface from the Peripheries
The Contest of the Fruits
A Chorus Without Conquest
Self Help
To See More: Gestures Toward Renewal
