Outline map, acrylic paint
95 x 135 cm

For over ten years, art collective Slavs and Tatars have made artistic and research-based investigations into an area they regard as at once real and imagined: “an area that falls between the cracks of history and general knowledge”: Eurasia1. Make Mongolia Great Again is one of many works which treads this line between fictionality and historical accuracy, in which what appears to be a historical classroom map is adapted in the style of an internet meme, blending seemingly dependable cartographic representation with strange and surprising visions. A diagrammatic outline of Asia becomes the background image for a Spanish caption which reads, “Hagamos Mongolia Grande de Nuevo”, or Make Mongolia Great Again. These words, displayed as top and bottom text, transfer the historical amnesia inscribed in Trump’s electoral campaign slogan of 2016 onto a geopolitical region which is often sidelined in Western media, to hint at a historical amnesia of a different sort, whilst simultaneously enacting the playful mimicry emblematic of meme culture.  

The re-appropriation of a message which over-amplifies the myth of former U.S. grandeur, as it arrives here sprawled over the landmass of Asia, results in a call to remember the history of the Mongol Empire, the largest continuous land empire in world history, which existed during the 13th and 14th centuries. The deployment of humour in this stark move is emblematic of a probing technique which Slavs and Tatars call the “metaphysical splits,” which involves the use of antithetical gestures and forced contrasts to open up new ways of thinking about the politics and histories of the complex Eurasian region, and de-centre prevailing understandings of historical greatness. The technique aids in their larger project of resuscitating history, a matter of great urgency for the collective. That Make Mongolia Great Again (Hagamos Mongolia Grande de  Nuevo)  is offered to the viewer in Spanish only exaggerates this act of gymnastic divergency and obfuscation.  

The lines which spill over the surface of the map reenact the kind of military strategic planning involved in the imperial expansion north, east, south and west under the leadership of Genghis Khan2, whilst also evoking a spread of bacterial forms across the surface of the work.3  As part of a cycle of research titled Pickle Politics, the group look to bacteria’s disruptive as well as productive properties and investigate the “practices and symbolism of fermentation, constructing a political argument using notions of the rotten, the spoiled, and the soured.”4  In their evocation of internet virality, nationalist slogans, and political and imperial histories in Make Mongolia Great Again, they thus use bacteria and micro organisms as a channel through which to discuss culture and spreading whilst continuing to ask questions concerning the production and validity of historical knowledge.
–Elsa Gray



1 https://www.slavsandtatars.com/cycles/regions-d-etre
2http://https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/slavs-and-tatars/
3http://https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xy4nzq/bacteria-inspired-art-infects-chelsea-gallery
4 https://slavsandtatars.com/cycles/pickle-politics

Slavs and Tatars is an art collective and "a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia". Founded in 2006, the group’s work is centered on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture performances

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