Slavs and Tatars: AFTEUR PASTEUR: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition with artist collective Slavs and Tatars. Featuring a new body of work, Afteur Pasteur challenges our understanding of the self through the unlikely relationship with bacteria and the microbe, the original Other or foreigner. Spanning both floors of the gallery, a fermented milk bar, sculptures, and two-dimensional works continue the collective’s playful exploration of the literary and political geography defined by themselves as “the region east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China". Their first return to New York since their 2012 MoMA project Beyonsense, Afteur Pasteur collides hidden histories with our present anthropocene moment, collapsing academia and pop culture in one sweep, tongue firmly in cheek. Their newest cycle of research "Pickle Politics” turns to fermentation and souring in order to mine questions about the limits of human knowledge.

In the main gallery, a bacteria bar serves the savory yoghurt drink known in Turkey as ayran: like kumis or kefir, a historically important provision of protein to the nomadic tribes of Central Asia. These drinks' current revival as a foodie and health fad belies a complex historical provenance: after all, it is these same Turkic and Mongol hordes against which Western Civilization has defined itself for more than a millennium. While consuming a cold frothy cup, gallery visitors are able to reflect on our normally antagonistic relationship with bacteria: Afteur Pasteur offers a sour take on the sacred Abrahamic tenet of hospitality.

Throughout the last decade, the collective's work has mined the complexities and unexpected affinities across seemingly disparate cultures through three main activities: publications, lecture-performances, and exhibitions. Much like their stories tease out other stories, these three axes spill into one another, a veritably probioitic approach where books spawn sculptures and lecture-performances are cultured from installations.

Interspersed amongst the bar setting are refitted army cots: each unravels another thread in the unlikely role of fermentation, from militarization to linguistics and cosmology. The works are imbued with a humor that belies their somewhat more serious content matter: playing on the Hebrew etymology of Kumis, Leavened nods to the Jewish origins of the nomadic Turkic tradition of fermented mare's milk found across the steppe. Microcosmos features a re-working of Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia where bacteria replaces man at the center of the universe, an attempt to renegotiate our relationship with the microbe and the microcosmos. Figa challenges the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the rational and the cerebral via a hand gesture considered obscene in some countries and a benediction in others. The thumb protruding from a clenched fist revisits the old Egyptian proverb: “Life is a like a cucumber: one day in your hand and one day in your ass.”