“Mirrors for Princes” at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is the first solo exhibition in Australia dedicated to the work of the Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars. Curated by the IMA’s Executive Directors, Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, “Mirrors for Princes” is a series of installations which form part of an exhibition at five different venues.Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars 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.” With a practice on based on three activities - exhibitions, books, and lecture performances - the collective addresses “a shared sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.”With “Mirrors for Princes,” Slavs and Tatars take as the point of departure a medieval genre of advice literature for kings. Drawing inspiration from the issues addressed in the books, which they describe as “the delicate balance between seclusion and society, spirit and state,” Slavs and Tatars have established two immersive and contrasting environments for the IMA.To find out more about “Mirrors for Princes,” which is at IMA Brisbane until December 20, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with Slavs and Tatars and asked a few questions.The title of your solo exhibition at IMA Brisbane is “Mirrors for Princes.” What is the significance of the title and what does it reveal, about the exhibition?The title hails from a medieval genre of advice literature for kings, the first attempt to craft a political science, in Christian and Muslim lands. At the time, the majority of scholarship was purely religious in nature: either theology or religious jurisprudence; mirrors for princes were the first attempt to put forward secular scholarship as a legitimate form of writing. Today, a millennium later, it struck as that we suffer from the opposite: an incontinence of political commentary but a precious lack of intelligent, elegant reflection on the role of faith in public life.More specifically, we’ve decided to adapt and adopt the genre: where originally mirrors for princes were traditionally top-down, with the intended audience the ruler, we’ve drafted a more bottom up or inside out approach, by exploring governance first and foremost as self-governance, that is, the conception of oneself as a multitude of peoples, nations, conflicting desires, and intentionalities, amongst others.“Mirrors for Princes” is a series of unique installations presented across five locations. Could you describe the installation that you will be presenting at IMA?At IMA, we’re presenting an entirely new scenography for Lektor, with a series of large-scale prayer beads, protruding from the ground, providing an opportunity for visitors to sit within the space. We’ve also got the excerpt of the 12th century Turkic epic, which is the premise of the multi-channel installation Lektor, translated into Jagera/Yuggera, an indigenous language of the Queensland area. What was the inspiration and motivation behind the installation that you are presenting at the IMA?The original excerpt of Lektor specifically addresses the tongue and language as a form of self-presentation, grooming and etiquette.How does the exhibition at the IMA connect and resonate with the other “Mirrors for Princes” installations that you have presented around the world?At each venue where Lektor has been previously presented, we’ve had the excerpt translated into the local language: at Istanbul Modern, into Turkish, at Kunsthalle Zurich into German, at NYU Abu Dhabi into Arabic, etc. In Australia, it was the first time we were confronted with English as the local language. We opted for an indigenous language instead. Given its delicate and endangered status in Australia, this inevitably highlights several issues: the role of language as a marker of identity, the type of langauge or terminology used by those in power vis-a-vis the Aboriginal population, and the potential for resonance with indigenous cultures of the syncretic, pantheistic elements in the original Turkic Muslim text.In what ways does “Mirrors for Princes” at the IMA reflect and echo the characteristics, trajectories, and philosophies that drive, and are the basis of, your overall practice?“Mirrors for Princes” aims to make urgent and immediate a genre or subject matter that could otherwise be construed as relatively obscure: a series of 10th-12th century texts from Christian and Muslim lands. Yet the attempt to balance the secular and the sacred at the heart of the original mirrors for princes resonates significantly with our practice and our times. We are experiencing a critical point in the “secular rage to know it all,” to quote the Catholic monk and translator Charles de Foucauld.
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