One of my favourite collective of artists, Slavs and Tatars enters the Tate in London!
Tate Acquires 100th Work For Its Collection From Frieze Art Fair
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Outset: curators pick four, Frieze donates two more
Tate director convinces Frieze to help round up acquisition figures
By Louisa Buck. From Frieze daily edition
Published online: 15 October 2014
Published online: 15 October 2014
This year’s duo with £150,000 to spend were Agustín Pérez Rubio of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires and Laurence Rassel from Barcelona’s Fundació Antoni Tàpies, accompanied by the Tate’s Frances Morris, Anne Gallagher, Tanya Barson and Clarrie Wallis.
They selected four politically charged works, but in a new departure, Frieze donated a further two works—Slavs and Tatars’s Love Letters (No.7) and Bernardo Ortiz’s Untitled—with a collective value of £20,000.
Slavs and Tatars, Love Letters (No. 7).
Number two in an edition of three, plus one artist’s proof; Raster Gallery (FL, G23) Pérez
Rubio:
“It was important that the works donated by Frieze were by younger artists, who are building
their careers but are not so famous. Slavs and Tatars and Bernardo Ortiz [right] are talking
about problems related to linguistics. This piece is about lost nasal sounds—and we like the
fact that it takes the less conventional form of a tapestry.”
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Love Letters No. 7, woolen yarn, 2014
The nose’s role in language is routinely overlooked, often overshadowed by the tongue and throat. Here a series of nasal letters from Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin that have been lost to language conversion are shown falling by the side of the road. Like breadcrumbs, the trail of forgotten letters maps out the course of modernization, which is synonymous with progress—always moving forward while leaving a path of upheaval and change in its wake. For example, ڭ is an Arabic letter that sounds like “ng,” but disappeared from the Turkish alphabet when it was Romanized in 1928.
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About Slavs and Tatars
Love Letters
The Love Letters carpets are based on the drawings of Russian poet, playwright, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930).
Mayakovsky initially worked on behalf of the Bolshevik Revolution, lending his talents to give voice to the Russian people at a time of great social upheaval and reconstruction. But as the revolution changed its course, Mayakovsky—known as the “people’s poet”—became extremely disillusioned and could not forgive himself for being complicit in Joseph Stalin’s ruthless rise to power, ultimately committing suicide at age thirty-seven.
Through caricature, the carpets depict the wrenching experience of having a foreign alphabet imposed on one’s native tongue and the linguistic acrobatics required to negotiate such change.
In particular, the carpets tell two parallel stories: that of the Bolsheviks’ forced Latinization and later Cyrillicization of the Arabic script languages spoken by the Muslim and Turkic-speaking peoples of the Russian Empire, and the 1928 language revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—Turkey’s first president—in which the Turkish language was converted from Arabic to Latin script.
The casualties of these linguistic takeovers—lost letters and mistranslations—are given center stage here as a testament to the trauma of modernization.
Texts and image captions by Gabriel Ritter, the Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art
See more about Slavs and Tatars' Love Letter work :
