AAP WEB: MADE IN DSCHERMANY - Slavs and Tatars
Founded in 2006 as a book club, the Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars are driven by the frictions found between linguistic systems. With a particular focus on Eurasia, which they define as the “area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China,” their interdisciplinary practice ranges from art installations to graphic design, public lectures and extensive publications that traverse fields of research including literature, religion and geography, among others. “Made in Dschermany,” their largest show in Germany to date, extended the group’s interest into German orientalism. Beginning with the dual digraph “Dsch”—the German transcription of the “J” sound, as in the German word “Dschungel,” the etymology of which is traced back to the English “Jungle”—the show draws attention to how foreignness has been dealt with across languages. Presented at the Albertinum museum, located in the city of Dresden, which is the main hub for the right-wing, anti-Islam movement Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida), the exhibition came at a time and place where re-evaluating otherness should be high on everyone’s agenda—though not without a sense of humor and self-reflection, of course.