2015.29.2 Slavs and Tatars, Love Letters No. 9

Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks found themselves inheritors to a Russian Empire with sizeable territories of largely Muslim, Turkic-speaking  populations. Vladimir Lenin believed the Revolution of the East—meaning the modernization and political eman­cipation of Muslims—required the Latinization of their Arabic-script languages. A decision was made in 1939 to change their alphabets once again, this time to Cyrillic. When these languages were Cyrillicized, each was done so in a slightly different manner. Thus, the various lan­guages could not be mutually intelligible, an example of the linguistic equivalent of “divide and conquer.”

For the artist collective Slavs and Tatars, language harbors the potential for multiple forms of resistance, whether it be sensual, political, or metaphysical. The group’s Love Letters series of ten carpets, inspired by the drawings of Russian poet, playwright, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, are an inquiry into “alphabet politics.” Alphabets impose an ordering system on language, forcing it to comply with the larger program of empire-building. The figure in Love Letters No. 9 cries out in pain and alliterative exhaustion, exclaiming the same sound written five different ways.

Gallery talk by Gabriel Ritter; Concentrations 57: Slavs and Tatars

89409682: UMO

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