SLAVS AND TATARS: HALLBADEREIEN / BATHHOUSE QUACKERIES: Westfälischer Kunstverein, Germany

Since its inception in 2006, the collective Slavs and Tatars has shown a keen grasp of the hot-button issues in society, clearing new paths for a contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of eclecticism. Their exhibitions, books, printed matter, and lecture-performances draw upon the stylistic palette of popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their focus on Eurasia challenges our often times one-dimensional way of seeing relationships between science, religion, power, and identity. On the occasion of their first solo exhibition in Germany, the artists turn to the enigmatic writer and philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, the Königsberg native who died in Münster, in the form of an expansive installation and pickle bar at the Kunstverein. In the current crisis of modernity, “Bathhouse Quackeries” places language and performativity at centre stage as a means to better understand the limits of reason and what it means to go sour on power.

Curated by Kristina Scepanski.