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Since 1998, Ringier, the Swiss-based global media company, has traditionally commissioned an artist to design its annual report. Publisher Michael Ringier and curator Beatrix Ruf initiated this series as a means of reinforcing the links between art and the activities of the company.
For the 2025 edition, Slavs and Tatars’ Simurgh Self-Help revisits Marcel Broodthaers’ seminal work Musée d’Art Moderne: Département des Aigles (1968–1972), replacing or “translating” the eagle—a symbol of power and empire that is used to challenge our understanding of authority and value—with the Simurgh, a mythical bird found across the Turkic-Persianate world. While the eagle is often associated with nation-states and masculinity, the Simurgh is decidedly transnational, metaphysical, and flamboyant, if not gender-fluid.
Much like the collective’s geographic remit—between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China—this publication attempts to shift our focus elsewhere, eastward, to regions that too often fall through the cracks of historiography and art history. If modern and contemporary art institutions in Broodthaers’ time were largely situated between the Rhineland and the Northeast United States, the multipolarity of today’s art world is a fait accompli: with biennials in Uzbekistan and museums in Kazakhstan, among others, rivaling the traditional centers of power.
Once also a sacred bird—accompanying Zeus, for example—the eagle has, over the past two millennia, undergone a thorough profanation: a brawny, secular flex of nationalism. It would be remiss not to see the parallels in the world of media: print itself and the act of reading, once an activity for the privileged few, has undergone a similar dynamic of democratization over the past several centuries, and, especially in recent years with the internet, a vulgarization that would make medieval Church elders wag their shriveled fingers at us in an I-told-you-so meme meant. This profanation has challenged the very institution of media and the narratives it disseminates, much as important works of institutional critique challenged contemporary art in the 1970s and beyond—akin to the genre-bending mix of high and low, East and West, sacred and profane of Slavs and Tatars’ work today.
Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars’ extensive publishing activity—some 15 books in 20 years—has delved into subjects as diverse as alphabet politics, Uighur literary culture, political satire in the Muslim world, and German anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Alongside sculptures, textile works, installations, sound pieces, and even a bricks-and-mortar Pickle Bar in Berlin, the collective’s books have cleared new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production that draws on popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, and modern myths, as well as on scholarly research.
Published by JRP editions
Softcover
224 pages
225 x 300 mm
ISBN 9783037646557
