Slavs and Tatars @ The Third Line, Dubai - "Simurgh Self-Help" Exhibition

Slavs and Tatars: Simurgh Self-Help

The Third Line, Dubai

4 February - 4 April 2025

Slavs and Tatars

Rabbit's Blood, 2025

Woollen yarn, 400 × 300 cm

© Slavs and Tatars, courtesy The Third Line

The Third Line presents Simurgh Self-Help, their third solo exhibition with the artist collective Slavs and Tatars. This exhibition presents a new body of work inspired by Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d'Art Moderne - Département des Aigles (1968-1972), one of the most influential works of conceptual art of the 20th century. In Simurgh Self-Help, Slavs and Tatars embark on an inventive ‘translation’ of the eagle through the lens of Simurgh, a mythical bird deeply rooted in Turkic and Persianate folklore, Sufi traditions, and the literature of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Gallery One is dedicated to exploring the mythology of Simurgh, a winged creature often depicted with the body of a peacock and the head of a dog. Simurgh is both female and male, though most frequently portrayed as female, and is said to have witnessed the destruction of the world three times over. The exhibition juxtaposes the eagle and the Simurgh to offer a speculative history, presenting an alter-ego for contemporary societies dealing with dilemmas about national identity and nationalism. Through this ‘translation’, Slavs and Tatars expand Broodthaers’ critique to include the often-overlooked region of Central Asia and the Caucasus, an area historically situated between fading empires - Russian, Ottoman, and Persian - and contemporary revanchist forces. If the eagle serves as a repository for nationalism and empire, rooted in geopolitical concerns, the Simurgh evokes an empire of senses and a dominion of the otherworldly, bridging the affective and the extractive.

In Gallery Two, the exhibition pivots to explore melons as Central Asian repositories of value, knowledge, and world-building. Writing, central to Slavs and Tatars’ practice, appears in the texture of melon skins and within the pages of books. Here, the melons, depicted as glass lamps or mirrors, tell the story of the region via flora, rather than fauna.

Slavs and Tatars have long been drawn to the peripheries of knowledge, the edges of belief systems, and the margins of rituals - places where syncretism and hybridity thrive. Today, however, they also seek to activate and redeem what unites us, as much as what distinguishes us.

Simurgh Self-Help is the first significant new body of work by Slavs and Tatars since Pickle Politics (2016-2023). Following its regional debut at The Third Line, Slavs and Tatars’ new body of work will feature in solo presentations at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany, and Frac Pays de la Loire, France, in 2025.

Artists Slavs and Tatars

Slavs and Tatars is an art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China, termed Eurasia. Their practice is primarily based on three activities: exhibitions, books, and lecture-performances. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via an idiosyncratic form of knowledge production including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research with a particular focus on cultures marginalized by Russian and Soviet imperialism. With a heady mix of high and low-brow humor, the artists turn to sculptures, installations, and text to excavate and explore a geography that is equally imagined as it is political. 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, as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region.

The collective’s work has been exhibited at major museums and biennials internationally, including Tate Modern, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland; 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; 10th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE; 8th Berlin Biennial, Berlin, Germany; 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece; 9th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea; and currently at the 2nd Islamic Art Biennial, Jeddah, KSA.

Their work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2012); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2012); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, US (2014); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2015); NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2015); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, USA (2016); Salt, Istanbul, Turkey (2017); Albertinum, Dresden, Germany (2018); and most recently MHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2023) and Basement Roma, Rome, Italy (2023).

Their works are in important public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Pinakothek der Modern, Munich, Germany; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland; Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin, Italy; and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, among others.

THE THIRD LINE

Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse 78, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE

thethirdline.com

teamLab Exhibition @ Pace Gallery, NYC - Interactive digital artwork "The World of Irreversible Change"

teamLab: The World of Irreversible Change 

Pace Gallery, New York 

May 10 – August 16, 2024 

teamLab 

The World of Irreversible Change, 2024 

© teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition by teamLab at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show spotlights a single interactive digital artwork—titled The World of Irreversible Change—projected on a wall in the gallery. This presentation marks teamLab’s first solo exhibition in New York in ten years.

Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko in Tokyo in 2001, teamLab is an international collective of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects. Known for its multisensory, immersive work, teamLab explores the relationships between humans and the world, encouraging new modes of perception through its pioneering, technologically advanced installations. In recent years, teamLab has presented solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Amos Rex in Helsinki; TANK Shanghai; and many other institutions and venues around the world.

In the exhibition at Pace in New York, The World of Irreversible Change is projected on a large, freestanding, black-painted wall in a darkened gallery space. First presented by the collective in spring 2022 at the Aomori Museum of Art in Japan, this screen-based work, created by teamLab over five years, has never before been exhibited as a projection. Conceptually, The World of Irreversible Change centers on everyday life in an anonymous city during an unspecified epoch. Animated figures move throughout the panoramic village scene, which change with the time of day and weather in New York. Scenery and stories unfold each day, and the lives of the people in the city continue eternally unless gallery visitors interact with the work, causing permanent disruption.

Over the course of its exhibition at Pace, The World of Irreversible Change can transform as a result of viewers’ engagement with it. If visitors continue to intervene with the work during its three-month presentation, the scenes of daily life become increasingly agitated and chaotic, with fighting between individuals escalating into an all-out war. Peace and harmony give way to fire and destruction, a devolution that speaks to the inherency and universality of violence in the human experience. The city becomes forever devoid of people, while plants begin populating its streets and ruins over time.

“In the ruined city where not a single person remains, the seasons still pass and the sun rises and sets with the time of the real world,” teamLab writes in a statement on The World of Irreversible Change. “After a while, new flora begin to grow in the burnt ruins of the city. The flora grow, bloom, and scatter repeatedly, changing daily with the real passage of time ... Once the world of this artwork begins to burn, the world from before can never be returned to. The people who interact with the artwork cause this outcome.”

PACE GALLERY

510 West 25th Street, New York City, NY

www.pacegallery.com

Artist collective GCC @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC

GCC: Positive Pathways (+)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Through November 23, 2016

GCC

Installation view of "Positive Pathways (+)," 2016

Courtesy GCC; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; Project Native Informant, London; 

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY; photo: Timo Ohler

Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents Positive Pathways (+), an exhibition of works by artist collective GCC. This is the group’s debut show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and their first in the United States since GCC: Achievements in Retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 2014.

The exhibition, which includes installation, wall sculptures and sound, focuses on the increasingly pervasive trend of Healthy Living and Positive Lifestyles gaining momentum in the Middle East. In particular, GCC explores the ways in which these lifestyle attitudes are appropriated, employed, and transformed as part of a greater political mechanism.

The exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash expands upon GCC’s 2016 project at the most recent Berlin Biennale, a sculptural installation of a woman and child. The woman is performing a Quantum Touch exercise, a non-contact touch therapy that became popular in the West in the late 1990s, on a boy as they stand on sand surrounded by a running track. The work, from where the exhibition borrows its title Positive Pathways (+), focuses on the ways that the positive energy movement and body healing practitioners have become co-opted by governments in the region – such as the creation of new ministerial positions like the UAE’s Ministry of Happiness, and the emergence of life coaches and Feng Shui consultants employed by hereditary leaders. Also on view will be a set of sculptural reliefs created using Thermoforming, a commonly used industrial process where thermoplastic sheets are heated and formed on a mold. The reliefs are based on 3D renderings of stills taken from YouTube videos and images found online of regional practitioners promoting the positive energy movement. Ranging from politicians to social media celebrities to TV clerics, these individuals utilize the Positive Energy attitude as a base for state policy. Referring to the erasure and creation of cultural myths, these reliefs create narratives of the present, a mechanism of both nation building and the politics of cultural extinction and creation.

About GCC

GCC, an acronym that does not necessarily stand for but alludes to the Gulf Cooperation Council (the intergovernmental political and economic partnership that connects six countries in the region), is an artist “delegation” or collective composed of eight members, all of which have strong ties to the Arabian Gulf region of the Middle East. The group was formed in 2013 at Art Dubai and has since shown at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin; Project Native Informant in London; The New Museum, Whitney Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York; Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; 9th Berlin Biennial; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Fridericianum in Kassel; and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

Since its debut at Sultan Gallery, Kuwait, the group has continued to address the shifting systems of power in the Gulf region and abroad. GCC live between Kuwait, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. Apart from several summits held in Switzerland, Kuwait, France and, most recently, New York, Whatsapp is the group’s primary mode of communication.

Collective members:
Nanu Al-Hamad (b. 1987)
Khalid Al Gharaballi (b. 1981)
Abdullah Al-Mutairi (b. 1990)
Fatima Al Qadiri (b. 1981)
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983)
Aziz Al Qatami (b. 1979)
Barrak Alzaid (b. 1985)
Amal Khalaf (b. 1982)

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
@ 534 West 26th Street, New York
www.miandn.com