Curators: Clouds, Power and Ornament – Roving Central Asia （Art Basel）

Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to the 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. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Secession, Vienna; Kunsthalle Zurich and Albertinum, Dresden, among others. Imbued with humour and a generosity of spirit, their work commonly blends pop visuals with esoteric traditions, oral rituals with scholarly analysis in a way that challenges our often times one-dimensional way of seeing relationships between science, religion, power and identity. In addition to launching a residency and mentorship programme for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars recently opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in Moabit.

You Mi is a Beijing-born curator, researcher and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/Documenta Institute. Her academic interests lie in the social value of art, new and historical materialism, as well as the history, political theory and philosophy of Eurasia. She takes the Silk Road as a figuration for re-imagining networks in her long-term research and curatorial project, and has curated exhibitions and programmes including the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-21), the research/curatorial platform ‘Unmapping Eurasia’ (2018-) with Binna Choi, and an exhibition at Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok (2018). Her recent exhibitions focus on socialising technologies and ‘actionable speculations’, such as Lonely Vectors  at Singapore Art Museum (2022) and Sci-(no)-Fi  at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019). On the social front, she serves as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational NGO Common Action Forum.