Slavs and Tatars: DAST BA KOR, DIL BA YOR

Screenprint on t-shirt, 100% cotton

The Naqshbandi Sufi order is one of the largest in the world, named after its 14th century founder who was born outside Bukhara in Uzbekistan. One of Naqshbandi’s main tenets was that devotion to God need not be demonstrated publicly, loudly or outlandishly as many ascetics at the time practiced or by withdrawing from society like a hermit. Instead one’s faith should be silently exercised, with one’s heart and one should engage in everyday life and work as any other citizen. So it follows that a proverb has been passed down the ages: ДАСТ ВА КОР, ДИЛ БА ЁРУ, meaning literally Hand at Work, Heart with God (in Tajik).

Slavs and Tatars (founded 2006, Eurasia) 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. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. In addition to launching a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar in 2020, a Slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin.