False Friends (Ceramics) revisits the ceramic tradition that originated with the Yoruba people of Nigeria and was later adopted by rural white communities in the southern United States. The series explores representation, beauty, and identity through ceramics. Inspired by Hurufism, the collective attempts to represent Turkish words in their original Arabic spelling, using strokes that evoke facial hair such as eyebrows, eyelashes, moustaches, or beards, seeking visual and sonic resonances with indigenous Mesoamerican languages.

The works False Friends (Mirrors) also explore the possible linguistic heritage between Mayans and Turks, using a technique of reverse painting on glass used in both Catholic religious art and the Shiite tradition. The words KAAN in Mayan and KHAN in Turkish, both related to “sky” or “open space above the head,” become symbolic of this transcontinental connection.

Alphabet Abdal alters the traditional associations with the Arabic language. Although it is often considered exclusively as the sacred language of Islam, Arabic was also the liturgical language of Middle Eastern Christians. The work proposes an “exodus of letters” that celebrates the Levantine and Hijazi origins of Christianity and reminds us that language can be a shared territory beyond religious divisions. The text that unfolds the piece – “Jesus, Son of Mary, He is Love” – written in Arabic characters, emphasizes this shared memory.

The act of combing or taming hair, especially curly hair, has historically been associated with social control and civilization. In Bazm u Razm (“Feast or Battle”), Slavs and Tatars explores the everyday ritual of combing by using glass combs as dual symbols of hospitality and violence. Inspired by both the afro combs of hip-hop culture and the talismanic seals of the Uighur tombs of Xinjiang, China, the works reference the Turkic peoples known for their military prowess as well as their generosity and hospitality.

In Bandari String Fingerling, the collective addresses facial hair removal as a gendered gesture of penance: a practice accepted by men but rejected by women. Both works reflect on the body and its care as spaces of tension between the biological and the cultural. Who Are You?, Alphabet (Uighur), and Saturday are part of a series begun in 2009 and made using thermoforming techniques. In Who Are You? the collective takes as its starting point the Arabic word hu, which is used in Islam, especially Sufism, to refer to the divine. Although it functions as a mantra in Zikr rituals, hu literally means “he,” highlighting the gender bias in the representation of the absolute.

Slavs and Tatars revisits Marcel Broodthaers’ Poèmes industriels in Alphabet (Uighur), replacing the Latin alphabet with a Cyrillic Uighur version. The exclamation “Vale!” remains unchanged, showing how certain meanings manage to resist changes in the linguistic and cultural system.

Finally, in the Saturday work, two intertwined numbers 6 form a Star of David, a symbol reinterpreted to allude to the six-year cycle of servitude prescribed in the Hebrew Bible. On the sides, the word manumissio is inscribed in Greek and Hebrew, linking the Jewish, Hellenic and Latin traditions around the notion of freedom. According to the Mosaic Law, slaves were to be freed in the seventh year – the Sabbatical year – presenting a cyclical and spiritual vision of emancipation that was progressive for its time compared to contemporary Christian and Muslim systems. The work thus proposes a transversal reading of history in which sacred languages, geometry, and archaeology intertwine to rethink forms of domination and salvation.

For Slavs and Tatars, translation, and especially transliteration, becomes a space for reflection on how languages, like cultures, are mixed, transformed, and sometimes lost in the political process of trying to cross borders.