LOS ANGELES — There’s a meditative quality to Slavs and Tatars: Hang Don’t Cut, on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through September 9. Step through “Soft Power” (2023), a carpeted black and white doorway, and you’ll find an array of blown glass lamps. They look like melons (in Slavic etymology, “melon” and “to blow” are close kin), and they glow hauntingly in the dark room.
Slavs and Tatars are an artist collective that focus on the part of the world “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China” through exhibitions, performances, and publications. As the exhibition description notes, melons hold special significance in Central Asia — winter melons are traditionally kept in warehouses and ripen last before the winter arrives. According to legend, they grew only in the Garden of Eden at first. When humanity was lucky enough to access them, the melons formed tiny cracks that looked like Arabic and contained indecipherable messages.
The lamps are surrounded by mirrors made of vague CAPTCHAs constructed from Russian Cyrillic, Kazakh Cyrillic, and Latin. The colors cut through the glass, reflecting back the lamps and the viewer to create an almost cosmic experience of the full gallery installation.
Knowledge and literacy in their many forms are at the heart of this small but rich show. One sculptural work, “Kitab Kebab” (2016), features books skewered together. “Kitab” means “book” in a variety of languages spoken in Eurasia, and the selection references the affective role of knowledge, not to mention the way learning cuts across various books and modes of study.
At the gallery entrance is “Riverbed” (2017), which features a takht, or shared seating arrangement common in teahouses, mosque entrances, and other communal spaces in the region. The installation includes the collective’s publications, such as The Contest of the Fruits, Molla Nasreddin: Polemics, Caricatures and Satire, and Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz. It’s a lovely dip into their work, if considerably less warm in the context of a white cube gallery than alongside a body of water.
“Underage Page,” a wall installation in a larger gallery space, incorporates a reading area that requires the reader to sit facing a wall, almost kneeling as if in penitence. In the same room is a yarn rug called “W-RK H-RD PR-Y H-RD” (2023), depicting hands in prayer.
The room’s wallpaper features seeds and icons that speak to the collective’s observation that, before mass printing, “reading was in fact a collective and largely oral activity, in particular for holy texts.” The cacophony of repetitious icons and the relative isolation of the reader creates a sense of closure rather than the infinitude of the glass lamps next door.
Walking around the lamps and mirrors, I thought as much about the stars as I did the Earth. The lamps look like far-off planets, floating through the galaxies that the mirrors create. The rug’s prayerful hands point upward, but they are clearly weathered by the Earth. Knowledge, it seems, sits in between Heaven and Earth. If books and literature help us make sense of the world, we can consume all we want, but like the melons of legend, they offer only glimpses.
Slavs and Tatars: Hang Don’t Cut continues at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (1010 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through September 9. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
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