Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz

REDCAT presents  the exhibition Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz, the first exhibition in Los Angeles by Slavs and Tartars, an international collective of artists, designers and writers. The exhibition is an examination of the unlikely points of convergence in Poland and Iran’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories, from seventeenth-century Sarmatism to the twenty-first-century Green Movement.

Slavs and Tatars‘s presents a range of sculptural objects, woven tapestries, lecture performances and photographic murals that address how the two countries’ respective efforts toward self-determination have shaped the larger geopolitical landscape, punctuating the major narratives of Communism and Islam in the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. Devoting its research-based practice to the area commonly referred to as Eurasia, a geography the group identifies as being “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China,” Slavs and Tatars’ works span disparate media and graphic traditions to focus on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians.