2025 Theses Doctoral
Slavs and Tatars: Semiotics of Collective Practice
This dissertation considers the ways that artistic collectives have become legible and value-producing social forms as they circulate within the institutions and economic geographies of contemporary art. My project focuses on Slavs and Tatars, a multilingual artist collective that began as a geographically dispersed reading group in 2006, and has been based in Berlin since 2014. I highlight the aesthetic, semiotic, and infrastructural dimensions of their practice and its modes and forms of production. I position the group as a lens through which to analyze the language and labor of knowledge production across economic geographies of contemporary art, the value projects of the German cultural state, migration and mobility politics, and the tensions of 'multicultural' Berlin.
The design of the dissertation reflects two strategic methods. First, I instrumentalize the mobility of the collective in order to better understand the structural interdependencies across scalar geographies of cultural value. Second, I bring attention to Slavs and Tatars' linguistic and discursive practices, and the aesthetic forms these produce. Across the arc of the dissertation, I analyze how Slavs and Tatars is discursively produced, and thus mobilized through the spaces and public contexts of contemporary art. Each chapter discusses a distinct instance of the collective's circulation, semiotic practice, and the entailments of value that emerge across the situated publics and economic geographies of contemporary art: from translation and exhibition projects that engage the collective's conceptual region of Eurasia, to the linguistic infrastructures of studio practice in Berlin's Moabit neighborhood; from a lecture performance at renowned public institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt, to the circulation of books in market, gallery, and exhibition contexts. I analyze these forms in contexts of their public circulation in order to understand the effects of semiotic labor in the production of cultural value.
I chart how semiotic practices of the collective productively engage economies of global art and state cultural funding—indexing place and social identity to derive value from a liberal politics of representation, on the one hand—while fostering emergent counterpublics through knowledge production on the other. Strategic language practices work to shift the accumulation and redistribution of material resources to artistic collectives and social projects throughout their region. I argue that this moves away from a politics of art that contests the state on ideological grounds, to one that engages regional, state, and municipal cultural economies in an effort to redistribute social capital and material resources. The dissertation puts forward a model for theorizing the political and economic geographies of contemporary art and culture, and the semiotic practices through which value, resources, attention, and meaning are made redistributable.
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More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Anthropology
- Thesis Advisors
- Povinelli, Elizabeth A.
- Degree
- Ph.D., Columbia University
- Published Here
- January 15, 2025