The Art of Place, the Place of Art

The two provocateurs who populate Slavs and Tatars keep a low profile. Their real names don’t appear in their works or their writings, and as proper philosopher-nomads they don’t advertise where they’re based in. They describe themselves as a “faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia.” This vast canvas gives them ample space to roam; but rather than flailing with all-encompassing brushstrokes—they confess that they “are not painters, but polemicists”—they build complex, even absurd, structures from the minutiae of history, language, geography, ethnicity and the everyday. In so doing, they ride the rails of two major worlds of thought and action that have galvanized conflict in the past and present centuries: Islam and communism. Perhaps not coincidentally, they and Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary film on Kazakhstan, .