What does it mean for one East to look to another East? Can the romanticised romanticise?

This lecture-performance, I Utter Other, will look at the curious case of Slavic Orientalism in the Russian Empire and early USSR, from Polish people in the service of the Tsar to Persian Presbyterians. This study of the East in the East complicates notions of identity politics and knowledge in the service of power, offering a crucial counterpoint, if not antecedent, to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) – a postcolonial critique some sixty years avant la lettre.

Biography
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 within 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 institution across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others. The collective’s practice revolves around three core activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances.