Europe

Slavs and Tatars

Wheat Mollah

2006

Slavs and Tatars, Wheat Mollah, 2011. Sculpture.

Wheat Mollah is one of Slavs and Tatars composite objects. The title has various interpretations, from “master” or spiritual authority for Shiites and “friend” for Sunnis. The turban is also worn in a diversity of cultures and religions in Africa, Asia and India. However, in this work, the turban is woven in wheat. For Slavs and Tatars, wheat is almost an atavistic element, used in the emblem of the USSR as well as in that of Iran’s first established bank, Bank Sepah and in the one of the revolutionary guards.

For the writer Fionn Meade, Slavs and Tatars’ object can also be described as “reminiscent of Marcel Broodthaers’s early sculptures that targeted Belgian nationalism and bourgeois complicity in colonialism via comic deployment of mussels, coal, and eggs alongside news from the Congo. Slavs and Tatars’ sculptural mashups of cliché and gravity likewise reside in the tension between literalness, critique, and dismissive laughter.”

Self-described as an “Eurasian-based” collective, Slavs and Tatars investigates the “polemics and intimacies” of the region “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China” or Caucasia. As part of their practice, Slavs and Tatars gives lectures and performances that embody the history and multiculturalism of this region they research. Using stereotypes, the collective Slavs and Tatars produces enigmatic and ironic objects that question the viewer's understanding of the geopolitics.

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Slavs and Tatars Wheat Mollah

Slavs and Tatars

Wheat Mollah