From the rarefied perches of the art world, the words “service” and “industry” seem to be faint echoes, something far away and remote from the aspirations for transformation, rapture if not autonomy which characterize fine art. While recent years have seen an increased interest in art as activism, too often the material conditions of art are compromised. In this seminar, Slavs and Tatars ask us to reconsider the notion of service as a generative means of contemporary art-making–no less formally rigorous, no less sensorially capacious. Questions of hospitality, design, authorship, communication, faith, and digestive as well as discursive nourishment will be explored via publications, exercises in public space, and institution building.

Slavs and Tatars
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institution across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently Лук Бук (Look Book) with Distanz Verlag. 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. https://www.slavsandtatars.com