Slavs and Tatars: The Contest of the Fruits

Rapping fruit, legendary birds and nail art feature in the UK debut of the Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars

Simurgh Self-Help, installation view, Esea Contemporary, Manchester, 2025. Photo: Jules Lister.

Esea Contemporary, Manchester
14 June – 14 September 2025

by JOE LLOYD

It is a perfect summer’s day, and I am sitting in a dark room watching a succession of animated fruit rapping in Uyghur. “Listen up,” I read from the subtitles, “All the fruits were throwing down.” The Mulberry goes first: “They smear my juice on their naked eyes” – a reference to the mulberry-derived sürmä eyeliner used in parts of the Islamic world. The Apricot that follows quickly shuts him down. “Oh, mulberry, skinny! Don’t you boast so much, you ninny … when you fall to the ground you’re donkey food.” After more boasting – “The ripe ones are a guilty pleasure! A gift for the throat by any measure” – the Apricot is in turn shut down by a grizzled, knife-wielding Apple, then a sensuous Peach, then a querulous Walnut, and so on. A gold chain-wearing Fig has the last word: “I’m powerful and muscular, my fruity flesh corpuscular.”

Slavs and Tatars, The Contest of the Fruits, 2021. Animation, 7 min 18 sec (loop). Installation view, Esea Contemporary, Manchester, 2025. Photo: Jules Lister.

This is The Contest of the Fruits, a video installation by Slavs and Tatars. It is the headline work of the collective’s first UK institutional solo show at Esea Contemporary (formerly the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art) in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. There is a method behind its madness. The rap is an adaptation of a satirical 19th-century Uyghur poem. The design of the fruits incorporates the Arabic calligraphy used to write each fruit’s name in the Uyghur language. This is both a reference to Hurufism, a Sufi movement that finds mysticism in the shapes of letters, and an assertion of a language that faces suppression from the Chinese state. The rapping is by the diasporic Uyghur Nash Tarr, who ventriloquises each of 13 fruits. He is backed by a track from Polish musician Lubomir Grzelak, who blends trap beats with traditional Arabic maqam modes. When we encounter the Uyghurs in Britain, it is usually through news reports or visiting restaurants. The Contest of the Fruits is a multipronged celebration of their language, literature and contemporary culture.

The animation sets the fruits against one another, but allows them a plurality of different voices. Film and poem call for understanding between individuals with differences. In this, it echoes the structure of Slavs and Tatars. Originating as a book club, it is now an artistic collective “devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia”. The name refers to the Slavic-speaking peoples dominant in eastern Europe and the Turkic-speaking people in an area that stretches from Europe to east Asia. Its work is political and often critical but laced with levity and humour. As the collective told Contemporary Lynx in 2022: “The question is: how to do both? How to criticise and be fun at the same time? That’s something very difficult to do, but our goal is to bring these two together.”

Slavs and Tatars, The Contest of the Fruits. Installation view, Esea Contemporary, Manchester, 2025. Photo: Jules Lister.

One of the ways the collective does this is through a poppy, sometimes cartoonish, aesthetic. It is unafraid of vulgarity. I first encountered Slavs and Tatars in 2016 at Raster Gallery in Warsaw, where it had set up a bar serving pungent shots of pickle juice decorated with obscene textiles and prints that managed to find entirely new forms of innuendo in the pickled cucumber. A few years later, the collective launched a permanent Pickle Bar in Berlin’s Moabit – in the city’s former west by a hair – which runs exhibitions, events and residencies. The pickle has proven to be one of the group’s enduring symbols. To pickle something is to preserve it through controlling the process by which it rots. Slavs and Tatars see this as oppositional to the binaries that define post-Enlightenment western thought, such as reason and irreason. The pickle, preserved decay, can represent two sides of the story at once.

Slavs and Tatars, Simurgh Self-Help, installation view, Esea Contemporary, Manchester, 2025. Photo: Jules Lister.

Another symbol the collective has alighted on is the Simurgh, a bird from Persian mythology historically associated with renewal and healing. More recently, its name has been taken by various brands and corporations. A growing body of work called Simurgh Self-Help seeks to save the Simurgh from this “vulgarisation and secularisation”. A lamp in the shape of a turban, Signal (2025), aims to raise alarm at this perceived misuse of the legendary character. It is displayed opposite a wall papered with hands spelling out the bird’s name in international sign language. This is a mode of communication without a single native user, a library of signs borrowed from other sign languages. Is the name of the legendary bird something that can draw disparate peoples together?

Slavs and Tatars, Signal, 2025., Resin, stainless steel, aluminium, spray paint, light bulb, 62 x 31 x 37 cm. Commissioned by esea contemporary. Photo: Jules Lister.

Many of the collective’s pieces are about the difficulties and eccentricities of translation. There are two brightly coloured works on plastic sheets painted with bold acrylics, redolent of Soviet graphic design, as well as Marcel Broodthaers’ Industrial Poems (1968-72). One of them, Who Are You? (2021), plays with how the same Arabic word serves as both “he” and a name for God. As in Christianity, the masculine and the divine are fused. The screen print The Alphabet (Uyghur) (2018) is a translation off Broodthaers’ L’Alphabet (1969) into a Cyrillic version of Uyghur. Broodthaers placed a comma and an exclamation mark over an O and K to involve the phrase OK! Slavs and Tatars show that this can be replicated in a very different alphabet and script. These works are at once visually straightforward yet require explanation. There’s a pop glossiness, but you might need a glossary for their work.

Slavs and Tatars, The Contest of the Fruits. Installation view, Esea Contemporary, Manchester, 2025. Photo: Jules Lister.

One is one hand: The Contest of the Fruits is accompanied by a 160-page printed book with essays, which feels almost as integral to the exhibition as the artwork itself. It contains writing, for instance, on “the erasure of Uyghur soundscapes” and the history of Uyghur rap. The interest in printed text as an artistic medium positions Slavs and Tatars in the lineage of the late 20th-century counterculture, as does their working in non-traditional art objects such as raps, lighting fixtures, T-shirts and pamphlets. The exhibition features a table with examples of nail shellac; Slavs and Tatars invited a local nail artist to its opening to paint nails to the collective’s designs. In doing so, they bring a resolutely popular form into the rarefied world of contemporary art, one that generally goes either dismissed or unnoticed. It is a mission worth cheering.