Slavs and Tatars

Slavs and Tatars
Author: Anthony Downey
Publisher: Jrp Ringier
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9783037644072

This form of political writing often called 'advice literature', shared by Christian and Muslim cultures alike, 'mirrors for princes' attempted to elevate statecraft ('dawla') to the same level as faith/religion ('din') during the Middle Ages.These guides for future rulers - Machiavelli's The Prince being a widely known example - addressed the delicate balance between seclusion and society, spirit and state, echoes of which we continue to find in the US, Europe, and the Middle East several centuries later.Today we suffer from the very opposite: there is no shortage of political commentary, but a notable lack of intelligent, eloquent discourse on the role of faith and the immaterial as a valuable agent in society or public life.This publication brings together the writing of preeminent scholars and commentators using the genre of medieval advice literature as a starting point to discuss fate and fortune versus governance, advice for female nobility, and an Indian television drama as a form of translation of statecraft. The illustrated essays are accompanied by an interview with Slavs and Tatars.Mirrors for Princes is edited by Anthony Downey, Editor-in-Chief of Ibraaz, and is published with NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery.

Slavs and Tatars

Slavs and Tatars
Author: Pablo Larios
Publisher: Koenig Books
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2017
Genre: Arts, Modern
ISBN: 9783960980704

Defining an area 'east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China' as their remit, Slavs and Tatars repeatedly creolize, craft and collide a political and imagined geography to topple our brittle notions of identity, language, and beliefs. Throughout their 10 year practice, the artist collective has turned to Turkic language politics, medieval advice literature, the relationship between Iran and Poland, and transliteration, to name but a few of their areas of research. The artists' work (from sculptures to lecture performances, installations to publications) similarly overturn the traditional hierarchies of understanding, seeing, and listening. Slavs and Tatars aim to free knowledge from the Enlightenment confines of the mind. Exhibition: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland (Nov 2016 - Feb 2017) / Pejman Foundation, Tehran, Iran (Apr 2017) / Salt Galata, Istanbul, Turkey (Jun 2017) / CAC Vilnius, Lithuania (Sep 2017) / Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia (Nov 2017) / Albertinum, Dresden, Germany (Winter 2017-2018).

Kidnapping Mountains

Kidnapping Mountains
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2009
Genre: Artists' books
ISBN: 9781906012199

Slavs and Tatars is a multi-artists' collective which is fascinated by the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. Through their often-playful art they delve into the riches of this cultural crossroads, the romantic sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians. Here they plunge into the fables and myths of the mountainous Caucasus region: the first part addresses the complexity of languages and identities on the fault line of Eurasia, and the second part, slyly titled Steppe by Steppe, explores the region's seemingly reactionary approaches to romance. Whether they're looking at art, fashion, lifestyle or science, Slavs and Tatars bring a new point of view to the table.

Molla Nasreddin

Molla Nasreddin
Author: Slavs and Tatars
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-02-16
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1838608842

Published between 1906 and 1930, Molla Nasreddin was a satirical Azeri periodical edited by Jalil Mammadguluzadeh and named after the legendary Sufi wise man-cum-fool of the Middle Ages (who reputedly lived in the thirteenth century in the Ottoman Empire). With an acerbic sense of humour and realist illustrations, Molla Nasreddin attacked the hypocrisy of the Muslim clergy, the colonial policies of European nations, and later the United States, towards the rest of the world and the corruption of local elites, while at the same time arguing for Westernisation, educational reform and equal rights for women. The publication was an instant success-selling half of its initial print run of 1,000 in the first day-and within months would sell 5000 copies per issue, which was record-breaking for the time. It became one of the most influential publications of its kind and was read across the Muslim world. Slavs and Tatars, a leading art collective focusing on Eurasia, has brought together this collection of sketches, caricatures and satirical writings from Molla Nasreddin, in the process revealing an unusual manifestation of nationalism in the Caucasus and its surrounding regions.

Nation, Language, Islam

Nation, Language, Islam
Author: Helen M. Faller
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2011-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9639776904

A detailed academic treatise of the history of nationality in Tatarstan. The book demonstrates how state collapse and national revival influenced the divergence of worldviews among ex-Soviet people in Tatarstan, where a political movement for sovereignty (1986-2000) had significant social effects, most saliently, by increasing the domains where people speak the Tatar language and circulating ideas associated with Tatar culture. Also addresses the question of how Russian Muslims experience quotidian life in the post-Soviet period. The only book-length ethnography in English on Tatars, Russia’s second most populous nation, and also the largest Muslim community in the Federation, offers a major contribution to our understanding of how and why nations form and how and why they matter – and the limits of their influence, in the Tatar case.

Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives

Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives
Author: Marleen Rensen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 303045200X

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde
Author: Steven S. Lee
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231540116

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

The Gumilev Mystique

The Gumilev Mystique
Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501703390

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev’s theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev’s complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

Cumans and Tatars

Cumans and Tatars
Author: István Vásáry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2005-03-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139444085

The Cumans and the Tatars were nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppe who exerted an enduring impact on the medieval Balkans. With this work, István Vásáry presents an extensive examination of their history from 1185 to 1365. The basic instrument of Cuman and Tatar political success was their military force, over which none of the Balkan warring factions could claim victory. As a consequence, groups of the Cumans and the Tatars settled and mingled with the local population in various regions of the Balkans. The Cumans were the founders of three successive Bulgarian dynasties (Asenids, Terterids and Shishmanids) and the Wallachian dynasty (Basarabids). They also played an active role in Byzantium, Hungary and Serbia, with Cuman immigrants being integrated into each country's elite. This book also demonstrates how the prevailing political anarchy in the Balkans in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made it ripe for the Ottoman conquest.