Exhibition
Slavs and Tatars. Pickle Politics

Thu, 10/17/2019 -
Fri, 01/31/2020
SUGAR Gallery

The Goethe-Institut is an Arts Partner of SUGAR. 
Slavs and Tartars are guests of the Goethe-Institut.

Pickle Politics is the inaugural exhibition at SUGAR by the Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars. The artists activate a cycle of work that uses fermentation to consider the transformative conditions of politics and culture. Ogorek Trocki posters repeating the image of a lost pickle-cucumber specimen, desired for its high sugar content, set the stage for a lecture marathon by Slavs and Tatars. Six consecutive lectures punctuate the exhibition, connecting the subject of fermentation with transliteration, language, cultural transference, and colonialism. The Pickle Juice Bar provides an opportunity to consume other life as microbiomes: "Pickle Politics looks to the practices and symbolism of fermentation, constructing a political argument using notions of the rotten, the spoiled, and the soured." (Slavs and Tatars).  

Slavs and Tatars’ practice has been devoted to the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, known as Eurasia. Fermentation is emblematic of our current times, as political forces in Russia, Asia and the Middle East challenge traditional axes of power: this cosmo-political balancing act continues to shape, reflect and drive forward ideologies that square the East and the West with contingent processes of life and death. The notion of fermentation offers another space between cultural and geographical territories, shifting beyond Levi-Strauss’ trichotomy of the ‘raw’, the ‘cooked’ and the ‘rotted’. Fermentation is that life-giving, death-driven process that takes place outside of what we think of as progress: a problematic historical approach that conflates the raw/cooked with the primitive/advanced.

SUGAR is a Toronto-based project that tracks urban transformation through diaspora, public intervention and political potential. The city is changing; its public spaces, expressions and attitudes have an opportunity to transform. Pickle Politics is a project about fermentation, about the forming of culture anew, through engaged transformation, conversation, and the inclusion of other forms of life.

The exhibition runs from 17 October 2019 to 31 January 2020

Opening Reception: 17 October, 6-10pm
Remarks: 7:15pm
Lecture performances by Slavs and Tatars: 7:30-8:20pm   Transliterative Tease

Friday, 18 October 
Lecture performance by Slavs and Tatars
6pm   Al isnad
7:30pm   Red Black Thread

Saturday, 19 October
Lecture performance by Slavs and Tatars 12pm
Molla Nasreddin: Embrace Your Antithesis 
1-2pm   Lunch (provided at SUGAR)
2pm   I utter other
3:30pm   79.89.09 (this lecture will be presented in Persian)

Visit sugarcontemporary.com for a schedule of all lecture-performances on 18-19 Oct.