ArteEast Quarterly: Slavs and Tatars: Embrace Your Antithesis (Molla Nasreddin)

April 1, 2012


Slavs and Tatars: Embrace Your Antithesis (Molla Nasreddin)

Slavs and Tatars

The spreads from these pages are taken from Molla Nasreddin, a weekly political satire that ran from 1906 thru 1930, first in Tbilisi, briefly in Tabriz in northern Iran, before settling down in Baku. One of the most important periodicals of the Muslim world in the 20th century, Molla Nasreddin was a progressive weekly read from Morocco to India, thanks in large part to illustrations reminiscent of an Honoré Daumier of the Caucasus. In 2011, Slavs and Tatars edited and translated a selection of the magazine’s illustrations for the first time in English for the publication Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP|Ringier).

As we leafed through 8 volumes, running roughly 500 pages each, recently re-issued in the original Azeri by the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, only the occasional page or two of Molla Nasreddin bore the mark of censors. In choosing what would make the final cut of 200+ pages, however, no poker-faced authorities advised us with the nudge of an elbow or a raised monobrow against this or that illustration.

They did not have to, as we did their job for them.
 
Whether attempting to accurately represent the magazine’s uniquely pro-Armenian stance (given the past and current enmity of Armenian-Azeri relations) or toning down its virulently secular anti-Islamism for fear the publication play into the hands of current-day Islamophobes around the globe, we turned to self-censorship and willfully lodged ourselves inside the very confines and responsibilities increasingly overlooked or categorically dismissed in this age of diuretic publishing. Despite a particularly turbulent period in Russian history, book-ended between two revolutions (in 1905 and 1917) not to mention the devastation of World War I, the editors of Mollla Nasreddin were able to take risks that we, sitting safely in Europe and the United States a century later, were not able to. So much for conceived notions of historical progress or the much-touted press freedom laws at the heart of liberal democracy.
 
Since that blistering day several years ago, carrying and caring for these volumes between Brussels, Moscow, Paris, New York, Berlin and Warsaw has toned our muscles if not our thoughts. We have wrestled with Molla Nasreddin: like any object of intense interest, it both repels and attracts us. But it is rare to embrace one’s antithesis, as we have with MN: spending years and significant sums of money translating, funding and publishing a historical document with which we often and fundamentally disagree. Standing squarely as a champion of secular, Western values, the weekly is in some sense a mascot, in reverse, of Slavs and Tatars’ practice. Where MN is secular and pro-Western, we tend to err on the side of the mystical and remain suspicious of the wholesale import of Western modernity. But, like the best cultural productions, Molla Nasreddin is polyphonic, joyfully self-contradictory and staunchly in favor of the creolization that results from multiple languages, ideas and identities.
 
The magazine’s pan-Caucasian character (itinerant offices between Tbilisi, Baku and Tabriz), linguistic complexity (across three alphabets) and use of humour as a disarming critique make for an irresistible trifecta which, despite any partisan polemics, we celebrate unequivocally.










 


 
 
  Slavs & Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians. Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009); Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010); and Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would've, could've, should've (JRP-Ringier, 2011). Their work has been exhibited at the Frieze Sculpture Park, the 10th Sharjah, 8th Mercosul, and 3rd Thessaloniki Biennials. After devoting the past 5 years primarily to two cycles of work, namely, a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus (Kidnapping Mountains, Molla Nasreddin, Hymns of No Resistance) and the unlikely heritage between Poland and Iran (Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz, 79.89.09), Slavs and Tatars have begun work on their third cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, on mystical protest and the revolutionary role of the sacred and syncretic, for group exhibitions at the GfZK, Leipzig and the New Museum Triennial as well as solo engagements at Vienna Secession, MoMA, NY, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.
 
   A version of this article appeared in the catalogue for The Station at Konsthall C, Stockholm.
 
   
 
  All images and text are copyrighted material owned by either the artist and/or writer and are reprinted with explicit permission for ArteEast Online and cannot be reprinted without consent of artist or author.