Most writing about Slavs and Tatars is hagiographic. Catalogue essays describe their research cycles in reverential terms, and magazine profiles home in on their geographical ruminations and visual puns. The collective and their collaborators make all of this easy precisely because they are articulate, having published more than a dozen books and much more ephemera.

That has a cost. When a practice is primarily described through its own terms, some questions go unasked. What does it mean to aestheticise syncretism for a predominantly western audience? Does the collective’s strategic unlocatability – not here, not there – resolve anything, or does it simply make irresolution appear to be philosophy? And who exactly is the region “east of the former Berlin Wall, west of the Great Wall of China” being made legible for?

There was a hint of an answer in a conversation hosted at the M+ Lounge featuring Payam Sharifi, one of the founders of the collective, in March. He described books as talismans, adding that the reason why Slavs and Tatars have pursued publishing as a significant part of their practice is because books can subvert art. The visual language deployed in the collective’s artmaking has a communal bent and speaks to everyone. If institutions and galleries have barriers that make it difficult for newcomers to engage with the art being shown, then Slavs and Tatars sidestep those obstacles to reach as many people as they can.

In their 20 years, Slavs and Tatars have carved out a conceptual geography that doesn’t map onto existing art world categories such as Middle Eastern, Eastern European or Central Asian. In fact, based on Sharifi’s comments in the M+ Lounge, geographical definitions and hyphenations around art practices probablyshouldn’t matter in 2026, yet they persist. The strength of Slavs and Tatars is that their humour, deep research and fluency in pop culture smuggle in dense intellectual content, despite the art world’s tendency to tame that kind of ambiguity – their Eurasia can otherwise only be treated as intellectual terroir by art institutions and those who attempt to force-fit the collective’s work into existing divisions.

Dedicated art historical examination of Slavs and Tatars is sparse. It’s an odd situation, given how well the collective are institutionally legitimised. Their work isn’t positioned by art scholars in a lineage or movement, perhaps because it’s anti-disciplinary by nature. Canonisation in the conventional art historical sense is structurally at odds with how the collective operate.

Yet put their art in a room, and it comes together. “胡 ( هو / who) are you?” at Rossi & Rossi included a set of artworks made by Slavs and Tatars over the past 15 years, spanning four of the collective’s research cycles. They shared a common trait: most were functional objects that were also vehicles for contested knowledge, whether geographic, linguistic, alimentary or ideological.

The three oldest works in the show – Triangulation (Not Berlin Not Bukhara), Triangulation (Not Bahamas Not Baghdad) and Triangulation (Not Detroit Not Damascus) (all 2011) – are concrete sculptures placed on the gallery’s floor, each with three sides visible. In every case, one city is secular in some sense, while the other is important for religious reasons. The sculptures are part of a series meant to critique the Stalinist policy of forcing Communism upon Muslim populations of the Soviet Union to replace Islam. Another reading here is that these works refuse association with a single place despite the use of specific locations as markers for exposition. In form, they recall Carl Andre’s Equivalent brick sculptures and Richard Serra’s Prop sculptures, but with a new dose of ideological indeterminacy: an unresolvable binary. Borrowing the vernacular infrastructure of signage suggests “you are here” precisely because you cannot be placed in one or other “there”.

The choice of concrete is important. It was the material of Soviet construction, used in housing blocks, official monuments and infrastructure all over the former USSR. Most significantly, it was used to physically reorganise the landscape of Central Asia. Casting negation in that material means using the coloniser’s substance against its own project of forced legibility. Whereas Soviet officials renamed cities and replaced Arabic script with Cyrillic, these sculptures replace the sign’s directive function with a shrug that is formally immaculate, minimal and deadpan. The critique arrives in the register of that which is being critiqued.

Down Low Gitter (2018) takes a heavy-duty, interlocking metal barrier and turns it into a set of seats where people can read, particularly in the communal sense rather than as a solo activity. An interpretation here is that the grid, which Rosalind Krauss argued in a seminal art theory essay published in 1979 is the defining structure of modernist art, is being subjected to a debasement and inversion. Slavs and Tatars deflate the grid’s pretensions to pull it into street slang. Frequently used at demonstrations, football matches and other public events to direct the flow and footprint of crowds, the gitter is recycled into an instrument for shared public experience.

Kitab Kebab (2020) is prop-like, absurd, with the collective literally pushing a skewer through books. One title, Mots D’heures: Gousses, is a book of English-language nursery rhymes transliterated into French, making the words meaningless in printed form but understandable when spoken out loud – a powerful nod at the linguistic politics at the heart of Slavs and Tatars’ practice. The transliteration performs exactly what the collective has spent two decades theorising: that the visual form of a word and its acoustic life can be decoupled, and that scripts can be political impositions on sounds that predate them. Meanwhile, meaning can survive or even flourish in the gap between the two.

The skewer does not discriminate. It offers all publications the same treatment, whether they are scholarly or absurd. The kebab is, after all, a preparation that makes no distinction between cuts of meat. Everything goes on the skewer and rotates over the same heat. This is almost aggressively anti-canonical as an epistemological model.

Samovar (2024) is part of the continually growing Tranny Tease (pour Marcel) series that was once described by Financial Times chief visual arts critic Jackie Wullschläger as art that counts as “biennale cliches” because they are “placards of unreadable script”. But that is the part of the point. It’s a pun where phrases and sounds are forced into the “wrong” alphabet, a phenomenon that people in Hong Kong are deeply familiar with.

Cantonese speakers who watch their mother tongue get flattened either through romanisation or into Mandarin pinyin understand intuitively what’s happening in artworks such as Samovar. Script is never neutral, because it carries the politics of whoever imposed it. Wullschläger’s dismissal of the Tranny Tease series is the perfect illustration of the problem: to a reader for whom the Latin alphabet is invisible infrastructure, unreadable script looks like decoration or visual noise. But for someone whose language has been re-lettered through imposition, it is history being lived. How the joke lands depends on which side of the writing system you grew up.

Dark Yelblow, a hand-blown glass lamp that has the appearance of a melon, draws on a legend that says the melon grew originally in the Garden of Eden and carries divine inscription in the cracks of its rind, since it has godly provenance. To some, these cracks look like Arabic script; since each melon is unique, new knowledge comes with each one. Dark Yelblow is an aesthetic object as well as an alimentary metaphor, just like Kitab Kebab. Fruit and books are both sites where knowledge is stored, transmitted and consumed. The lampglows from within, suggesting knowledge is not only inscribed on the surface but also emanates from inside the object, and that divine inscription is also a light source.

The word “yelblow” does even more heavy lifting. It’s neither yellow nor below, neither a color nor a direction. It exists only because two words were pressed together and lost their borders. Here, alphabetical politics are grafted onto alimentary metaphor. When you stand in front of a hand-blown glass melon-lamp with a “misspelled” colour for a name, you are interacting with an artistic practice that prevents any single system of meaning – botanical, scriptural, chromatic or linguistic in this case – from remaining sovereign over the others.

Hagiography misses what the objects actually do by focusing on Slavs and Tatars’ erudition rather than the effect of their artistic practice. The collective are making artworks that test whether meaning can survive transliteration from one script to another, one material to another or even one century to another. Perhaps the question of whether this constitutes a canonical practice doesn’t matter when you are standing in the room with these artworks. What matters is that the cracks are still legible and the joke lands exactly where it should.

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關於斯拉夫與韃靼的文獻，大多都帶歌功頌德的語調。展覽圖錄的文章往往以敬仰的詞彙描述他們的研究脈絡，而雜誌專訪則聚焦他們的地理思辨與視覺雙關。這個藝術團體和與他們合作的藝術家之所以容易落入這樣的文字，正因他們本身善辯，至今已出版超過十二本書籍，以及更多各類型的出版物。

這種現象有其代價。當創作實踐主要透過自身語言表述時，便會忽略某些問題。將「融合」美學化並向以西方為主的觀眾呈現，到底有什麼意味？團體策略性地保持「既不在此，也不在彼」的「不可定位」性質，究竟有否解決什麼問題，還是只是將無解包裝成一種哲學姿態？而那個「柏林圍牆以東、長城以西」的區域，究竟是為誰而定義？

今年三月，M+會館一場由團體創辦人之一Payam Sharifi參與的對談似乎出現了一絲答案。他將書籍形容為護身符，並指出斯拉夫與韃靼之所以將出版作為創作的重要部分，是因為書籍能夠顛覆藝術。團體在創作中運用的視覺語言帶有強烈的公共性，試圖與所有人對話。如果說藝術機構與畫廊令新觀眾難以投入作品，斯拉夫與韃靼則選擇繞開這些障礙，盡可能接觸更多人。

在過去二十年間，斯拉夫與韃靼建構出一種概念性的地理空間，無法對應如中東、東歐或中亞等既有的藝術分類。事實上，從Payam Sharifi在M+的發言來看，來到了2026年，圍繞藝術實踐的地理劃分與標籤或已不再重要，但它們仍然存在。斯拉夫與韃靼的優勢在於，他們以幽默、深入研究與對流行文化的熟悉，將之滲入密集的智性內容之中，儘管藝術界往往傾向馴化這種曖昧。他們所提出的「歐亞」概念，反過來只會被藝術機構和強行將作品分類的人當作「知識風土」。

針對斯拉夫與韃靼的藝術史研究相當稀少，情況其實頗為奇特，畢竟團體已獲藝術機構的高度認可。他們的作品並未被學者納入藝術脈絡或運動之中，或許正因其反學科的本質。以傳統藝術史方式進行的經典化過程，在結構上與他們的運作模式並不相容。

然而，當其作品置於同一空間時，它們卻能彼此呼應。在Rossi & Rossi舉行的《胡 ( هو / who) are you?》展覽，匯集了團體過去十五年間、橫跨四個研究階段的作品。這些作品有同一個特質，就是它們多數是具功能性的物件，同時亦承載著具爭議性的知識，無論是地理、語言、飲食，還是意識形態亦然。

展覽中最早的三件作品《三角分（不是柏林，不是布哈拉）》、《三角分（不是巴哈馬，不是巴格達）》和《三角分（不是底特律，不是大馬士革）》（皆為2011年）為放於地上的水泥雕塑，每件均呈現三個可見面。在每一件作品中，呈現一個某程度上代表世俗的城市，以及一個有重要的宗教城市。這系列的雕塑原意在於批判史太林時期，將共產主義強加於蘇聯穆斯林人口以取代伊斯蘭信仰的政策。另一種理解方式是，儘管作品使用具體地點作為說明標記，它們卻拒絕與任何一個地點產生聯繫。在形式上，這些作品令人聯想起卡爾‧安德烈的《Equivalent》磚雕與理查‧塞拉的《Prop》系列，但引入了一種新的意識形態不確定性，一種無法解決的二元對立。借用日常指示標誌的語言，彷彿在說「你在這裡」，因為你無法被安置於任何一個「那裡」。

水泥的選擇尤為關鍵，它是蘇聯建設的主要材料，廣泛用於前蘇聯的住宅區、官方紀念碑與基礎設施之中。更重要的是，它曾被用來實質重塑中亞的地貌。以這種材料來呈現「否定」，其實是將殖民者的材料反過來對抗其將世界強行變得可讀與可分類的工程。當蘇聯政權為城市改名，並以西里爾字母取代阿拉伯文字時，這些雕塑則以一種形式上極簡、冷靜甚至帶點無動於衷的姿態，將標誌原本的指示功能轉化為一種聳肩的回應。批判，正是在被批判之物的語言中發生。

《Down Low Gitter》（2018年）將一種沉重、互扣的金屬圍欄轉化為一組座椅，讓人們坐上閱讀，而且是以集體而非個人的方式閱讀。其中一種解讀方式是如羅莎琳‧克勞斯在1979年的重要藝術理論文章中所指，這種網格是現代主義藝術的核心結構。在這件作品中，網格被貶抑與顛倒，斯拉夫與韃靼將它從理論高度拉回街頭語境。原本常用於示威、球賽與各類公共活動疏導人流的圍欄，在作品中重新轉化為一種共享裝置。

在《烤書串》（2020年）中，一根燒烤籤穿過書本，仿結道具並帶有荒誕感。其中一本名為《Mots D’heures: Gousses》的書，收錄以法文音譯的英文童謠，朗讀時可理解內容，但在文字上卻失去意義，這正是斯拉夫與韃靼語言政治的創作核心。音譯展現了他們二十年來的理論，詞語的視覺形式可與聲音分離，而書寫系統本身可能是後於聲音、甚至強加其上的政治產物。與此同時，意義不僅能在兩者之間存活，甚至可能在裂縫中滋長。

燒烤籤一視同仁，無論學術還是荒誕的出版物都同樣對待。畢竟烤肉串本身也不會區分肉的部位，無論何種部位都會被串起，在同樣的火上旋轉。作為一種知識模型，作品帶有近乎強烈的反經典意味。

《薩莫瓦壺》（2024年）屬於持續進行的《Tranny Tease (pour Marcel)》系列之一，系列曾被《金融時報》首席藝評人傑基‧伍斯格萊格批評為「雙年展的陳腔濫調」，稱其為「無法閱讀的文字」。然而，這正是作品的重點之一。作品呈現的是一種語帶雙關的「食字」，將詞語與聲音強置於「錯誤」的字母系統中。對香港觀眾而言，這種現象並不陌生。

粵語人士目睹母語被羅馬拼音和普通話拼音削弱，會直覺理解《薩莫瓦壺》這類作品。文字從來不是中性的，它承載著書寫者的政治。首席藝評人傑基‧伍斯格萊格對「Tranny Tease」系列的否定，正好體現了問題所在。對於習慣以拉丁字母為無形基建的讀者而言，無法閱讀的文字只不過是裝飾和視覺噪音。但對於那些語言曾被強制改寫的人來說，那正正是一段活生生的歷史。笑點如何成立，取決於你成長於哪一種書寫體系之中。

《Dark Yelblow》是一盞手工吹製的玻璃燈，外形如同一顆蜜瓜。作品的靈感來自一則傳說：蜜瓜原生於伊甸園，外皮裂紋蘊含著神聖的銘文。對某些人而言，這些裂紋看似阿拉伯文字。每顆蜜瓜皆獨一無二，每一件作品亦帶來新的知識。《Dark Yelblow》與《烤書串》一樣，既是美學物件，也蘊含飲食隱喻，水果與書本均是儲存、傳遞與消化知識的載體。燈從內發光，暗示知識不僅銘刻於表面，也從物件內部散發，而神聖的銘文同時亦是一種光源。

「Yelblow」一詞本身亦承載多重意義，它既不是「yellow」，也不是「below」，所以它既非代表顏色，也非方向。它之所以存在，是因為兩個詞被擠壓在一起，失去了彼此的邊界。在作品中，字母政治被嫁接到飲食隱喻之上。站在這盞「拼錯」顏色名稱的玻璃蜜瓜燈前，你正在面對一種拒絕單一意義系統主導的創作實踐，無論是植物學、宗教文本、色彩還是語言亦然。

歌功頌德的文獻，過分強調斯拉夫與韃靼的學識，而非其藝術實踐所產生的效果，忽略了物件實際的作用。團體的作品正是在測試當意義從一種書寫系統轉移到另一種、從一種材料轉移到另一種，甚至從一個世紀跨越到另一個世紀時，是否仍能存續。或許當你置身於這些作品之中時，作品是否屬於某種「經典」已不再重要。重要的是，那些裂紋依然可被辨識，而笑點可以準確落點。