Slavs and Tatars, Stan de Natris: Readers who can Swim
The open lecture-performance by the artist collective Slavs and Tatars focuses on their graphic design output over the past 12 years.
Taking their Лук Бук (Look Book), published by DISTANZ and Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee) in 2022, as a point of departure, the collective showcases the multiform applications of their graphic designs. What emerges is a practice that refuses easy categorisation, moving fluidly between the visual and the conceptual, the serious and the absurd. The collective explores the intersection of language, politics, and identity across Eurasia, blending scholarly rigour with playful humour and merging archival research with bold visual design. Their work draws on a vast and eclectic range of cultural references, navigating between historical legacies and contemporary concerns with equal fluency. Typography, image, and text are never merely decorative but function as active carriers of meaning, disrupting assumptions about how knowledge is produced and communicated.
Through publications, posters, editions, merchandise, and ephemera, they challenge cultural assumptions and provoke dialogue across disciplines. Each object or printed matter becomes a site of enquiry — an invitation to look again, read differently, and question the frameworks through which we understand culture, power, and belonging. In doing so, the collective positions graphic design not as a service industry but as a form of critical practice in its own right.
Slavs & Tatars is an original, cross‑disciplinary, non‑academic artist collective whose work operates within the frameworks of various art forms, as well as societal, social, and ethnic inquiry. The group’s approach is accessible and maker‑driven, offering university‑level visual arts students a breather from the Western tradition of teaching art that has become the status quo over time. The group is extremely famous, with a vast global following, which of course says something about the success of their work.
About 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 their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. 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 as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region. More information: slavsandtatars.com.
Visiting professors lecture series
Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts regularly invites distinguished international artists and art experts to teach for a fixed period. The visit also includes a public lecture that is open to all. uniarts.fi/visiting-professors.
Taking their Лук Бук (Look Book), published by DISTANZ and Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee) in 2022, as a point of departure, the collective showcases the multiform applications of their graphic designs. What emerges is a practice that refuses easy categorisation, moving fluidly between the visual and the conceptual, the serious and the absurd. The collective explores the intersection of language, politics, and identity across Eurasia, blending scholarly rigour with playful humour and merging archival research with bold visual design. Their work draws on a vast and eclectic range of cultural references, navigating between historical legacies and contemporary concerns with equal fluency. Typography, image, and text are never merely decorative but function as active carriers of meaning, disrupting assumptions about how knowledge is produced and communicated.
Through publications, posters, editions, merchandise, and ephemera, they challenge cultural assumptions and provoke dialogue across disciplines. Each object or printed matter becomes a site of enquiry — an invitation to look again, read differently, and question the frameworks through which we understand culture, power, and belonging. In doing so, the collective positions graphic design not as a service industry but as a form of critical practice in its own right.
Slavs & Tatars is an original, cross‑disciplinary, non‑academic artist collective whose work operates within the frameworks of various art forms, as well as societal, social, and ethnic inquiry. The group’s approach is accessible and maker‑driven, offering university‑level visual arts students a breather from the Western tradition of teaching art that has become the status quo over time. The group is extremely famous, with a vast global following, which of course says something about the success of their work.
About 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 their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. 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 as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region. More information: slavsandtatars.com.
Visiting professors lecture series
Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts regularly invites distinguished international artists and art experts to teach for a fixed period. The visit also includes a public lecture that is open to all. uniarts.fi/visiting-professors.