Since its inception in 2006, the internationally renowned artist collective Slavs and Tatars has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse as communion, via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production including popular culture, exhibitions, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, merchandise, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.
The work of Slavs and Tatars has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, among many others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances.
Slavs and Tatars has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region.
Michał Grzegorzek is a curator and writer and recently appointed Program Director of Studio Gallery in Warsaw. His areas of interest include activities at the intersection of the performing and visual arts, as well as experimental exhibition formats. Since 2016, he has worked at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, where he was a curator of performing arts. Together with Mateusz Szymanówka, he has developed research examining the relationship between contemporary performance and club culture. Since 2022, he has been co-curating Kem School, a programme of joint learning through experiments and reflection on social choreography, performance and methods of queer and feminist activities.