Slavs and Tatars

Lecture-Performance: The Transliterative Tease

Istanbul Modern Cinema

Thursday April 10, 2014

19.00-20.00

Slavs and Tatars will present a lecture-performance, The Transliterative Tease in the context of Neighbours, for which they proposed a new installation, composed of “Nose Twister” and “Lektor” commissioned by Istanbul Modern.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians.

Through the lens of phonetic, semantic, and theological slippage, The Transliterative Tease explores the potential for transliteration –the conversion of scripts– as a strategy equally of resistance and research in notions of identity politics, colonialism, and liturgical reform. Across Slavs and Tatars' three cycles of work, the lecture performance investigates in particular the urgency of syncretism, as found in the eastern frontier of the Muslim world, in Central Asia, aka Khorasan, aka Turkestan, the basis of their research for Not Moscow Not Mecca in 2012 and current research into Turkic language politics in Istanbul and Xinjiang.

“The march of alphabets has always accompanied that of empires– Arabic with Islam, Latin with the rise of Roman Catholicism, and Cyrillic with the Orthodox Church; The Transliterative Tease attempts to emancipate not peoples or nations, but rather the sounds rolling off our tongues.”

The Transliterative Tease has been presented at the Kunstverein Bielefeld and Yale Art Gallery / Department of Fine Arts.

The event is free of charge and will be held in English with simultaneous translation into Turkish.

Organized as part of the 2014 cultural program celebrating 600 years of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Poland with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.