The collective Slavs and Tatars explores the cultural, political, historical, and linguistic entanglements of Eurasian geography, illuminating diverse aspects of translation, alphabet politics, transliteration, religious rituals, propaganda, mysticism, and pop culture. A defining feature is their blending of philological inquiry with subversive humour, typography, and graphic elements. The work Reverse Dschihad (2015) examines the German Empire’s political agenda and propaganda strategies during the First World War, focusing on an unusual event at the Wünsdorf prisoner-of-war camp near Berlin: Max von Oppenheim, founder and first director of the ‘Intelligence Office for the East’, collaborated with Enver Pasha, the Ottoman minister of war, to orchestrate Sultan Mehmed V Reşad’s proclamation of jihad against France, England, and Russia in Istanbul on 11 November 1914. The most peculiar part of this operation was arguably the 1915 publication of El Dschihad, a propaganda magazine printed in Russian, Arabic, and Turko-Tatar and distributed to Muslim prisoners of war at Wünsdorf. El Dschihad aimed to stoke anti-imperial sentiment in territories controlled by the Entente powers, urging Muslims to either join the Central Powers on the battlefield or return to their home regions to incite rebellion against their colonial rulers. In their work, Slavs and Tatars examine the linguistic dimensions of the German word for jihad, Dschihad (Arabic: ‘to struggle’), notable for its awkward transliteration of the sound /ʤ/ as ‘dsch’ (as in Dschingis Khan or Dschungelfieber), which marks a word as distinctly foreign. Since the idea of jihad emerged within the context of Germany’s wartime agenda—ultimately through the instrumentalization of political Islam—the question arises: whose struggle was this, and against whom was it waged?

Works in the exhibition: Reverse Dschihad (Russian) (2015), screenprint on polished steel, 244 × 122 × 0.1 cm; Reverse Dschihad (Tatar) (2015), screenprint on polished steel, 244 × 122 × 0.1 cm; Reverse Dschihad (Urdu) (2015), screenprint on polished steel, 244 × 122 × 0.1 cm; Reverse Dschihad (Arabic) (2015), screenprint on polished steel 244 × 122 × 0.1 cm. All courtesy of the artists and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin and Munich