Reverse Joy looks at Muharram, the yearly Shi’a commemoration of Hossein, as a perpetual protest movement for its radical reconsideration of history and justice. Inserting oneself, flesh and faith, into events that transpired thirteen centuries ago; the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of roles of men and women; and joy through mourning, Muharram has taken on a near-cosmic significance, beyond regional rivalries, and possibly beyond the faith itself to impact notions of identity, mysticism, protest, and resistance in the world at large.
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally-renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China, known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.
Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions across the globe, including the Vienna Secession, MoMA, New York, Istanbul’s Salt, and Albertinum Dresden, among others. Slavs and Tatars’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König Verlag. Their Slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space, Pickle Bar, opened in 2020 a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin.